Coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller, a great deal of dialogue has happened both on and off line about the nature of rights in America, and the powers of government. In the last 221 years, people have forgotten that the relationship of government and citizenry is one of servant and master—that government only has the powers that we as a people have ceded to it. And as the founders thought it important to state the “common sense” nature of the vision they had for an American government, it is important today to restate some of that common sense. Especially today (and this weekend).
Governments derive their “just” powers from the consent of the governed. Powers—not rights. Governments do not have rights, people do, and when people cede some measure of their rights to government (for whatever reason), they are granting limited powers to the government. We, as a people, stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence that we created this government to preserve our rights (and that, in fact, that is the highest and best purpose of any government: to protect and preserve those individual rights).
Yet we routinely hear people talking and writing about the “rights” of government to engage in all sorts of activities. We have had more than seventy-odd years of so-called “progressive” jurists and legislators expanding the power of government at the expense of a myriad of individual rights—rights to expression, rights to self-defense, rights to hold and enjoy private property. These expansions were all done in the realm of some nebulous public good, and yet they have left we, as a people, damaged. The facts surrounding Heller were but one example.
The anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London decision recently passed, and that case gives us a prime example of such damage. In Kelo, the high court built on long-established precedents that watered down the protections laid out by the founding fathers in the Constitution’s 5th Amendment. We gave the government the power to take private property, provided that three things happened:
1) That such a taking be for a legitimate public use;
2) That due process was accorded to the property owner; and
3) That “just compensation” was paid to the prope