It recognizes rights that are already there and serves to block the government from infringing upon them.
That is why the founders, Jefferson especially, spoke of the self-evident rights of Englishmen (and by extension all men). The justification for the Revolution was that their natural rights as free Englishmen were being trampled upon by a tyrannical parliament in which they had no representation and a tyrannical monarch who was upending the balance between the executive and legislative branches of English government.
The Bill of Rights doesnât grant us our rights. It merely acts as an enforcement tool so that the government cannot infringe upon those rights without due process.
Talking points again.
Look at free exercise of religion in amendment 1, Double jeopardy and self incrimination in Amendment 5, speedy trial in Amendment 6. These were not known in British law. They were established by the constitution.
To say that the constitution grants us our rights as free citizens is to say that the government grants us those rights. In that situation the government could infringe upon them without due process.
The issue today is that far too often the people, or the body of the citizenry, has allowed the federal and state governments to infringe upon our natural rights without due process.
Free exercise of religion is not spoken of as being an existing right. It was not an existing right anywhere in the world until established by Amendment 1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
I have given several examples of rights which did not exist that were, for the first time, established by the constitution. You have ignored them and kept repeating the same thing.
A speedy trial. Does the constitution say that is an existing right that it is protecting? No
No you are quoting the constitution and what it actually says. Nowhere does it specifically state that a right is being granted. It merely protects against the violation of certain rights. There is a difference and not a minor one
No they didnât believe that. They knew they had committed treason and said so.
Our Founding Fathers were former colonists under a tyranny that controlled information and freedom of expression. King George III suppressed free speech, especially speech critical of the Crown or the government.
âThe Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to âcreateâ rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.â
Justice William J Brennan
Brennan may have said that, but he didnât mind using the Bill of Rights to create rights.
In Griswold v Connecticut, Brennan is one of the Justices who found the right to privacy in the Bill of Rights. No one else had found it in two hundred years of reading them.
Yes and no. Mostly no.
Hereâs a summary of Griswold from the Oyez website.
In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Douglas, the Court ruled that the Constitution did in fact protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on contraception. While the Court explained that the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments create the right to privacy in marital relations. The Connecticut statute conflicted with the exercise of this right and was therefore held null and void.
They said the BoR created the right to privacy then protected it.