in Featured World News The Government Has No Rights, but the People Do
by AWR Hawkins
Although Democrat and other leftist politicians will, from time to time, speak of the government’s ‘rights,’ we must never forget the government has no rights. Only the people have rights and the government, on the other hand, has powers.
Moreover, the government’s powers are delegatory rather than original. In other words, the powers possessed by the government are those which the people delegated to it via the framework of the U.S. Constitution, and those powers are neither ambiguous nor infinite.
This is most easily understood if you think about the U.S. Constitution as establishing a compact between the people and the government, a compact best explained by Thomas Jefferson in the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.
Jefferson wrote:
Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general Government for special purposes,—delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government…
Jefferson was strongly impacted by John Locke, who had written, “The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth.”
Jefferson and Locke are saying the same thing, just in a slightly different way. The lesson to be drawn is that the people enter into a “compact” (Jefferson) wherein they “consent” (Locke) to certain a degree of legislative power over their persons as they move about in society.
However, the people retain authority because they possess rights. Thus Madison, in Federalist 46, observed that “ultimate authority…resides in the people alone.”