ron_drummond

The Ninth Amendment's purpose is to acknowledge that there are other rights which are not mentioned in the Bill of Rights, and to affirm that the people still have those rights, even though they aren't mentioned in the Bill of Rights.

To quote the actual amendment:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

It is a very spare amendment that lays down a huge generalization that basically covers everything else. This type of statement is common in contract law, and it occurs to me that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are contracts with we have with ourselves. We have let the neo-cons (whom I suspect of being neo-nazis) trample both the Constitution and Bill of Rights with impunity.

Equire Magazine endorsed Obama saying in their headline: "Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President"
We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up.

Why mention this when touting ron_drummond's post? Let me pull out a few quotes from the endorsement:

In truth, though, Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things -- be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska -- that we own together.last June's Boumediene decision, helped create a thin 5 -- 4 majority in favor of reestablishing the right of habeas corpus for those people being detained by the administration in places like Guantánamo Bay.

There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. [emphasis mine] It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.

Rights are important, and this is why Esquire magazine's endorsement, based, at least in their discussion of it, centrally on our Constitutional rights is so important. The New Yorker magazine's endorsement of Obama focuses on his many abilities, all of which are very valid reasons to vote for him, but it is the issue of rights, and who will be appointed to the Supreme Court that deserves more emphasis.

Just to be perfectly clear, ron_drummond's post is completely separate from the Esquire endorsement article. I read parts of that article to ron_drummond this evening after he posted, and that was the first he had heard of it. He drew my attention to the New Yorker endorsement, which also is brilliant.

ron_drummond cross posted it at TPM, so go over and recommend it. This is a forgotten amendment that maybe we should all start remembering.