What Are Some Rights In The Constitution – Book/printed material A Bill of Rights as provided in the original ten amendments to the United States Constitution in effect on December 15, 1791. [n. pp. 195-].

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What Are Some Rights In The Constitution

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A Bill of Rights as provided in the ten original amendments to the United States Constitution in force. n. s. 195 Freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of the press. The right to assemble, bear arms and due process. These are just some of the first 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. But they were not included in the original US Constitution, and James Madison, the bill’s principal author, had to be convinced that they belonged in the supreme law of the land.

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Madison was actually once the main opponent of the Bill of Rights. In his book, The Oath and the Office

, Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University, writes that when the Founder entered the race for Congress as a candidate for the state of Virginia in 1788, the question of whether America needed a Bill of Rights was a dominant campaign issue. George Mason, a fellow from Virginia, had refused to sign the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. But Madison argued that it was unnecessary and perhaps even harmful.

His reasoning? “Madison may have felt like a master chef watching a customer pour ketchup over the perfectly cooked steak,” Brettschneider writes. “He considered his work in creating the Constitution so thoroughly that there was nothing to change: Article I limited the power of Congress, and Article II limited the President. A Bill of Rights was redundant at best – and dangerous at worst.”

Madison and many of the framers were also concerned that an explicit guarantee of rights would be too restrictive, Brettschneider adds.

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“They believed the structure of the new constitution itself placed limits on government, so they were concerned that by listing some rights, the government might think it had the power to do anything it wasn’t explicitly prohibited from doing,” says he.

However, Virginians did not trust that Article I and Article II would protect their rights, and demanded such a bill, according to Brettschneider. Madison, partly for political survival, eventually campaigned to introduce a Bill of Rights, winning the election against James Monroe.

Tony Williams, senior teaching fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, says Thomas Jefferson, through a series of letters written from Paris, helped persuade Madison to change his mind as well.

“A declaration of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and which no government ought to deny, or rest upon inference,” Jefferson wrote to Madison in a December 20, 1787, letter.

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But more importantly, Williams says, Madison wanted to quell the opposition of the Anti-Federalists to the new government by proposing a Bill of Rights in the First Congress.

“The Federalists had also promised the Anti-Federalists rights-protecting amendments during the ratification debate, and he wanted to fulfill that promise,” he says.

Madison, tasked with writing the new amendments, addressed some of his concerns by including the Ninth Amendment, which states that states’ rights are not limited to those listed in the Constitution, and the 10th Amendment, which limits the powers of the federal government to those provided specifically in the Constitution and its amendments.

“The Bill of Rights is an important assertion of an individual’s natural and civil rights, and the critical Ninth Amendment is a reminder that people have other rights not listed in the first eight amendments,” Williams says.

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Drawing on Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, as well as Britain’s Magna Carta and other documents, Madison introduced the Bill of Rights in Congress on June 8, 1789, and it was ratified on December 15, 1791.

Democracy, says Brettschneider, is often assumed to mean majority rule, but the Bill of Rights includes many guarantees of minority rights that are equally necessary for self-government.

“The First Amendment right to free speech means that citizens can criticize their leaders with impunity,” he says. “The right to assembly, also in the First Amendment, means that citizens can protest government policies we disagree with.”

Other rights declared in the document ensure that citizens are not treated arbitrarily by the state. Under the Fifth Amendment, all citizens are guaranteed “due process” in the legal system. The Eighth Amendment, by prohibiting “cruel and unusual” punishment, meanwhile, ensures that the government cannot use the criminal code to, as Brettschneider says, “make the citizens docile and fearful.”

A Bill Of Rights As Provided In The Ten Original Amendments To The Constitution Of The United States In Force December 15, 1791. [n. P. 195 ].

“It is sufficiently evident that persons and property are the two great subjects of government,” said Madison in an 1829 speech in Virginia, “and that the rights of persons and the rights of property are the objects, for the protection of which government was instituted.”

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Find out how the US Supreme Court upholds freedom of speech and religion and the right to due process

The federal government is bound by many constitutional provisions to respect the fundamental rights of the individual citizen. Some civil liberties were specified in the original document, notably in the provisions guaranteeing the writ of habeas corpus and trial by jury in criminal cases (Article III, Section 2) and prohibiting appearance and subsequent laws (Article I, Section 9). But the most important limitations on government power over the individual were added in 1791 in the Bill of Rights. The first amendment to the constitution guarantees the rights of conscience, such as freedom of religion, speech and the press, and the right to peaceful assembly and petition. Other guarantees in the Bill of Rights require due process for people accused of a crime—such as protections against unreasonable search and seizure, involuntary self-incrimination, double jeopardy, and excessive bail—and guarantees of a speedy and public trial by a local, impartial jury before an impartial judge and representation by a lawyer. Rights to private property are also guaranteed. Although the Bill of Rights is a broad expression of individual civil liberties, the ambiguous wording of many of its provisions—such as the Second Amendment’s right “to keep and bear arms” and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” – has been a source of constitutional controversy and intense political debate. Furthermore, the rights guaranteed are not absolute, and there has been considerable disagreement about the extent to which they limit state authority. The Bill of Rights originally only protected citizens from the national government. For example, although the Constitution prohibited the establishment of an official religion at the national level, the official state-sponsored religion in Massachusetts was Congregationalism until 1833. Thus, individual citizens had to look to state constitutions to protect their rights against state authorities.

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After the American Civil War, three new constitutional amendments were adopted: the Thirteenth (1865), which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868), which granted citizenship to those who had become slaves; and the fifteenth (1870), which guaranteed formerly enslaved men the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment placed an important federal restriction on the states by prohibiting them from denying any person “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and guaranteeing every person within a state’s jurisdiction “the equal protection of its laws.” Later interpretations by the Supreme Court in the 20th century gave these two paragraphs extra meaning. In Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Due Process Clause