Kerby Anderson

Constitutional lawyer, John Whitehead, used the recent Bill of Rights Day to illustrate the cultural and political attacks on our fundamental rights. Here are a few examples.

We have a First Amendment, but you “can be persecuted for criticizing the government, prosecuted for reporting on government wrongdoing.” You can also be “fined and jailed for exercising your religious beliefs.” Although we have a Second Amendment, owning a gun can get you put on a government watch list.

The Fourth Amendment supposedly protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures. He argues that those protections have been “all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers” along with “technological advances that allow the government to spy on Americans’ activities, movements, and communications.”

Even though we have the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, he explains there is little protection if “the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land, or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes.”

The Seventh Amendment promises us a trial by jury. Unfortunately, juries that are ignorant of the Constitution provide us with very little protection.

The Ninth Amendment might say that power comes from the people, but “the power to govern no longer flows upward from the people.” And protection from the Tenth Amendment has been “rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite.”

If we want to turn this around, we need to find and then support candidates who understand our constitutional rights and will fight for them in the legislature and support judges and justices that will do the same.