Citizens of America, particularly emigrants from Europe, must be taught the reason why and the fact that the one American people “were bound to have and did at last secure” a government free from interference by “legislatures, whether representing the states or the federal government.” (Judge Parker, supra, in Preface.)
Who is to teach the average citizen the reason or the fact? Have our most renowned lawyers shown any knowledge of either? Their own briefs have been permitted to speak for them. Which of those briefs has put a finger upon the basic flaw in the Eighteenth Amendment challenge to the fact that the American citizens “did at last secure a Government” which its citizens “could control despite” all legislatures, whether representing state citizens or themselves?
The men who wrote these briefs are far more than lawyers of great renown. They are among the best known leaders of public opinion in America. Many thousands of average citizens rely upon such men to know and state every constitutional protection to individual liberty. In any generation, reliance upon any public leaders for knowledge on that matter is a distinct menace to individual liberty. The imaginary Eighteenth Amendment will have served a useful purpose if it teaches us that we must know of our own knowledge, if we want to remain free citizens of America.
“No man, let his ingenuity be what it will, could enumerate all the individual rights not relinquished by this Constitution.” (Iredell, later a Supreme Court Justice, in the North Carolina convention, 4 Ell. Deb. 149)
These are the rights “retained by the people” of America in the Ninth Amendment because not enumerated in the First Article.
“If this Constitution be adopted, it must be presumed the instrument will be in the hands of every man in America, to see whether authority be usurped; and any person by inspecting it may see if the power claimed be enumerated. If it be not, he will know it to be a usurpation.” (Iredell, in North Carolina convention, 4 Ell. Deb. 172.)
All granted powers to interfere with the individual freedom of the American citizen, “in that character,” are enumerated in the First Article.
All powers of that kind not enumerated therein are reserved in the Tenth Amendment exclusively to the American citizens themselves to be exercised or granted by them in the “conventions” of the Fifth Article.
One of these powers is that which some governments of state citizens, in the Eighteenth Amendment, have attempted both to exercise and grant.
The brief of which public leader has known or stated these facts to the destruction of the Amendment and to the continued existence of the free American citizen?