I was thinking about the Bill of Rights today, and I’m starting to think that most people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Bill of Rights says. Granted, I have no factual basis for this belief, other than personal experience that most people are idiots.

Most people, when asked what the Bill of Rights is, would say that it’s a set of rights that the United States Government gives us, as listed in the Amendments to the Constitution. That’s wrong. The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant anything. The “Bill of Rights” is a list of restrictions, not freedoms. The Bill of Rights doesn’t allow actions, it forbids them.

As an example, let’s take the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

See? “Congress shall make no law…” Surely, though, that’s the only one. The rest of the Amendments grant rights, right? Let’s look at the second:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

“…shall not be infringed.”

Let’s jump to the last of the Bill of Rights, Amendment 10:

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.

All powers not given exclusively to the federal government are reserved to the States or the people.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written by those who honestly believed and stood up for the idea that “supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” Okay, maybe they didn’t stand up for that last part, but the idea stands. The government has power because we give it power.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant us certain freedoms, it says that we forbid the government to infringe on these things. The next time someone tells you that the United States of America is a great place to live because the government protects our rights (and I’m guilty of this myself), tell them that they’re wrong. The United States of America is a great place to live because we have given the government a strict set of rules to follow, because we recognized that we grant the government its power, and created a government around that idea.

As people drift from this idea that we are the source of the power in this nation, as they start to think that the government rules us and forget that it only does so at our behest (as a society, not necessarily as individuals), it will become easier and easier for us to accept “small” infringements on our rights, and eventually, it will be true that we only have those rights because the government permits it, and when that happens, we won’t have any.

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Not entirely unrelated, Kevin Baker (I swear, I read some blogs besides Smallest Minority.) points out that the ACLU thinks that they, not the Constitution (and certainly not The People), determine what our fundamental civil liberties are.