EDITORIAL: Democrats and Bill of Rights Day
The Trump impeachment crusade has led Democrats to profess their fealty to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Sunday was Bill of Rights Day. Perhaps it’s a good time, then, to examine just how dedicated progressives truly are to safeguarding the rights contained in those first 10 amendments to our nation’s guiding document.
The First Amendment’s free-speech protections are under withering attack in academia, as many left-leaning professors, intellectuals and student activists now advocate government regulation of expression as a means of attacking “white privilege” or suppressing “hate speech.” In addition, congressional Democrats have proposed rewriting the First Amendment to prevent individuals from using their resources “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The Second Amendment … well, there’s really no need to elaborate.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit in the erosion of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” as state surveillance intended to combat terrorism has been used to gather information from everyday Americans.
The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private land “for public use without just compensation” was shredded when the Supreme Court’s liberal wing carried the day in the infamous 2005 Kelo decision, holding that government may transfer property from one private owner to another in the name of promoting economic development. At the same time, the aggressive and hulking federal administrative state promoted by Democrats routinely tramples property rights through overzealous regulatory enforcement.
In addition, progressives now embrace a system that all but ignores in college sexual assault allegations the due process rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment’s provision that “the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him” is equally under attack from similar quarters.
Jumping to the 10th Amendment, Democrats in the Resistance seeking to battle the Trump administration have acquired a recent fondness for the idea that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Expect that to evaporate quickly, as the reinvigoration of the 10th Amendment is anathema to their goal of an activist state.
Those on the right have their own blind spots when it comes to the original amendments, particularly regarding law enforcement powers. But if Nancy Pelosi &Co. insist on wrapping themselves in the Constitution to justify their effort to overturn the 2016 election, they might want to reconsider their hostility to the principles of liberty and limited government that are deeply embedded in the Bill of Rights.
