Why the Constitution is Irrelevant, and the Bill of Rights is Indispensable

“It has been said that all of us are naturally anarchists at heart, - which is only to say that we all desire the largest possible personal freedom and the least possible external restraint.”

-Roger N. Baldwin

Much is often made of our “Constitutional rights” in political debates; it is a phrase evoked in the context of explaining the legal rights of Americans or to attack something that is considered contrary to these rights. The mistake in the usage of the phrase is in the content of the Constitution, which hardly mentions individual freedoms and instead establishes our government’s structure, term lengths, which branch has what powers, financial issues, etc. (transcript of the Constitution). The document that should actually be evoked is the Bill of Rights.

Technically, of course, the Bill of Rights (transcript of the Bill of Rights) is a series of amendments to the Constitution and therefore a part of it. But in our minds it is often seen and treated as a separate document, which in many ways it really is, or should be.

The Constitution without the Bill of Rights has little impact on individual liberties, nor is it the perfect document we are led to believe in grade school. The original document devised in 1787 actually had a section that limited personal freedom and supported the right to own slaves.

Article IV

Section 2

No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Most of us are familiar with the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857. We can criticize the Supreme Court’s decision that Scott had no rights as “a person of African descent,” but according to the Constitution, which the Supreme Court is supposed to view as the “law of the land,” they did exactly as they should have done, legally speaking. So the Constitution actually supported an extreme case of injustice by law. For 78 years this was an acceptable segment of the United States highest laws, until the passing of the 13^th Amendment of the Bill of Rights in 1865 which superseded that section of Article IV.

The entire purpose of the Bill of Rights was to prevent just such travesties from occurring; it is the true great achievement of America’s founding fathers that still resonates in the modern world. Before the Bill of Rights was drafted, some at the Constitutional Convention feared the central government would use the “laws of the land” to “open the way to tyranny.” Their fears were obviously justified.

The Constitution is irrelevant because its only purpose is to establish a form of government, and all governments, even republics, will suppress and trample the inherent rights of its citizens at some point. The United States government has even used its power to use the Bill of Rights, a document that’s purpose, by its very name, is to protect and uphold freedom, to take away certain rights they deem inappropriate or to use it to further the government’s own needs at the people’s expense.

Until the last 100 years the Bill of Rights was exactly as its name implied, but since 1913 the government has added new amendments that negatively affect people’s liberty. The 16^th Amendment was used to increase the central government’s power to levy taxes (no amendment that increases the government’s power is to the people’s benefit) and in 1919, the most famous amendment to take away freedom, congress ratified the 18^th Amendment which took away the right to sell and imbibe alcohol. This amendment is one of the main reasons we have large networks of organized crime flourishing in the U.S. to this day.

Recently there has been talk about another proposed amendment, this one used to legally establish a definition for marriage: one man and one woman. This amendment is obviously an attempt at conservatives to make gay marriage illegal in all states permanently. Definitions are the work of dictionaries, not laws. It seems the Bill of Rights, in the hands of a government, has lost its original intention to protect the people under that government’s authority and now is predominantly used to suspend certain freedoms that some elected officials believe should not be granted. They believe this as if they had the power to grant or take away freedom. That is a dangerous and slippery slope.

When taking into account the Bill of Rights, the Constitution seems like a superfluous document. The idea, during the time of the American and French Revolutions, that there should be a universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, is the lasting achievement of the enlightenment era. The evolution from monarchy to republicanism served a great purpose 230 years ago, but the evolutionary process is not complete and seems to have stalled because of the vested interests of a tiny minority of the population obsessed with greed and power. With anarchism the Bill of Rights still has a place in society; a universally accepted document that prevents one person, or group of persons, from suppressing others. That should be the “law of the land,” that there is no law besides universal freedom.