Liberty Is for Human Thriving, not Just Convenience

This past week the United States Senate held confirmation hearings for Judge Neil Gorsuch. Hours of questions and answers provided a great opportunity to learn about how our government works.

One standout moment was when Senator Sasse (R-Nebraska) asked Gorsuch to teach a civics lesson on why we have the Bill of Rights. Gorsuch’s answer was brilliant -- what every American should know and always remember.

He first said, “The Constitution is a negative document.” We did not write a constitution to make sure the federal government had enough power, we wrote it to make sure that it never got too much power.

The theory behind the Constitution is to divide power. That protects liberty. America’s founders had learned the hard way that when “you put all power in one set of hands, you’re going to get tyranny.”

Let this sink in, deeply. The opposite of liberty is not inconvenience. The opposite of freedom is not a citizen who opposes your will, or who won’t do what you want them to. The opposite of liberty is government tyranny.

To stand up for liberty is not to argue for the right to have my way. It is to fight against the accumulation of power that can bankrupt your businesses, tear apart your families, and force your silence.

To protect this vital liberty America’s founders divided power in three ways. First, they divided the power of the federal government itself into three branches; Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. This is not just a convenient way of splitting up the work, as though there’s just too much for any one branch to do. This is a separation of powers.

It’s not merely that the legislature usually writes the laws, but sometimes it’s O.K. to have the other branches write laws too. Rather, if the judicial branch writes a law from the bench, they are not only taking freedom away from the person who is ruled against. They are taking a step toward putting both parties, and all the rest of us, under tyranny.

If legislators pass a law giving bureaucrats from the Executive branch authority to write the rules they will enforce, they are not merely speeding up the law-making process. They are selling their constituents out to tyranny.

So why do they do it? Because legislating is hard. It’s hard to get that many people to agree on something. That’s the point! Gorsuch reminded us, “It’s supposed to be tough, to protect liberty. We don’t’ just have one house. We have two houses.”

For something to become a law, it has to pass through both the 435 member House of Representatives, and the 100 member Senate. Then, it has to be signed by the president too! If you think this is too frustratingly slow of a process, and you want to speed it up by assigning the work to some committee, think again.

The people who wrote the Constitution had lost loved ones, and bled themselves. They learned the hard way that when it’s too easy to pass laws, too many laws are passed. And that’s very bad for human freedom. All of this is designed to be hard. Part of protecting liberty is making it difficult to legislate.

We, the people of America, are interviewing Gorsuch for a perpetual position on the highest court in the land. I can think of nothing that qualifies him better, than for him to answer, “The president’s powers are to execute the laws, not make them, not adjudicate disputes. Our role is to decide cases and controversies between people under law as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

Not only does he understand the purpose of three branches in the federal government. He knows that our Constitution divides power in another way as well. He said, “The federal government has certain enumerated powers and authorities. And what the Federal government doesn’t enjoy, the states do as sovereigns.”

The fact that state laws differ from state to state is not a problem. We do not need the federal government to impose lock-step uniformity from on high. The United States of America are states, first of all. They are united by a limited, federal government. The Constitution does not put limits on state powers, it put’s limits on federal powers.

It does this by enumerating what powers belong to the federal government. Then the Tenth Amendment states, “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.” This is plain and simple language which means, if the Constitution doesn’t specifically say that Washington has the right to pass some law, they don’t.

This too is not just for convenience, but to protect us from tyranny. It allows the states individually to wrestle and experiment with all the difficult problems of forming a just society. This unleashes the ingenuity of the citizens in fifty different states to learn from each other and improve on each other.

More than that, it treats every citizen as a human being created to rise to the challenges of life by their own creativity, and not be hampered by the mistakes of others, far away. Federal overreach – whether it be a judiciary that throws out state’s marriage laws, or an executive agency that won’t let a man dig a stock tank on his own land – is an attack on our common humanity.

For this reason, America’s founders were still not through protecting our liberties. While many fine people thought that the Constitution was enough to prevent these tyrannies, others insisted that we needed still more protection. So, they added the Bill of Rights.

These ten amendments to the constitution picked out a few of the most basic rights and explicitly denied the Federal Government any power at all in these matters. Freedom of speech, press, and religion are among the first listed. So also gun rights, freedom from military or law-enforcement oppression, and the list goes on.

Those founders who were opposed to the Bill of Rights, were not opposed to any of the rights themselves. Everyone understood that these things should be protected without question. But there were those who feared that if we singled out any rights for protection, some federal bureaucrat would assume that they could mess with the ones we didn’t name.

So, perhaps the most important amendment of all in the Bill of Rights, is the Ninth Amendment. It says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

This amendment takes us back to the main limiting function of the Constitution. All rights are granted, not by our government, but by our Creator. They are granted by the One who makes us human and gives us the responsibility to live as the human beings we are.

Tyranny, which does not recognize these rights, is not just an infringement against doing whatever we want. It is an attempt to replace our Creator, and, by extension, an attack on who we are, as His creatures.

Now, more than ever, we need to relearn the genius of the Constitution. Now, more than ever, we need to defend its original meaning. Now, more than ever, we need to elect those who will uphold it, and impeach those who do not. It shouldn’t matter whether that person agrees with our favorite policies or not. Because freedom lost, even for a good cause, is a loss for all humanity.

I’m glad that Judge Gorsuch gave us such an eloquent civics lesson. I hope that he is our next Supreme Court justice. But more than that, I hope that each and every reader of this column will dig deeply into the Constitution and stand with him in defending it.