January 1, 2011 6:14 PM MST
The New Year’s Eve edition of the Daily Progress published a letter to the editor from Edward Strickler of Albemarle County, who praised the Jefferson Area Libertarians for sponsoring a reading of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution on Bill of Rights Day at the First Amendment Monument in downtown Charlottesville.
“It is great to have champions of liberty in our community,” wrote Strickler.
As it happens, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner interviewed one of the featured speakers at that event, Robert Tracinski, a member of the Jefferson Area Tea Party and publisher of The Intellectual Activist. (The other featured speaker was WCHV radio host Joe Thomas.)
Importance of 9th Amendment
The topic of Tracinski’s remarks was the importance of the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The Ninth Amendment, Tracinski explained, is not so much a legal statement as it is a “statement of political philosophy.”
The amendment, he said, states that “individual rights are the basis of this whole thing, that pre-existing individual rights retained by the people are the essence and everything the government does has to be limited by that.”
9th Amendment jurisprudence?
There is no “Ninth Amendment jurisprudence” among Supreme Court decisions, he noted, “because it’s so broad and abstract.”
Rather than being the basis of specific judicial decisions, Tracinski said, the importance of the Ninth Amendment lies “more [in] the idea that it’s a guide to constitutional interpretation, because it basically says, ‘when in doubt, err on the side of individual rights. Err on the side of individual freedom.’”
The Ninth Amendment, he continued, “invites the interpreter of the Constitution, including Supreme Court justices, to refer back to the Declaration of Independence and to the Lockean, pro-individual rights position in there, as the basis for and meaning of the Constitution and as the grounds for interpreting everything in the Constitution.”
Default position: individual liberty
He cited a famous quotation from Thomas Jefferson “about how we should trust people to run their own lives.” When it comes to government, Jefferson said, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
This idea, Tracinski said, is that “for the individual out there in the world, you should be able to view the world as a field of unobstructed action, with only a few areas marked off saying you can’t go there.”
The exceptions are such things as armed robbery or assault, he explained, and “there are a few very evil deeds that we’re not going to let you do and we’re going to punish you if you do them. Other than that, the field’s wide open. You can do what you want.”
On the other hand, he said, “for the government, it should be the exact opposite: there should be a few little islands where we say, ‘OK, here, national defense, law enforcement, the courts, these things you’re allowed to do and you can operate in this area’ but [the government is] hemmed in around all sides and the rest of the world is off limits to [it] and [it] can’t go there.”
That, Tracinski said, should be “how we look at things in terms of the relationship of the government to the people. That’s what the Ninth Amendment basically tells us.”
In part two of this interview, Tracinski traces the origins of the Ninth Amendment.
Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on January 1, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.
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