Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of a project exploring the amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Before anyone picks up a hammer, before a shovel of dirt is turned, before a plan is sketched out, there is something that happens first. No building can happen without knowing the lay of the land.
A survey defines the property. It marks the limits of ownership and responsibility. It creates the framework within which every other decision is made. Without it, there is no clear understanding of where authority begins and where it ends.
The Ninth and 10th Amendments serve a similar purpose in the Constitution.
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” reads the Ninth Amendment.
“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,” states the 10th Amendment.
In a recent interview, Bill of Rights Institute senior fellow Tony Williams described the amendments as complementary protections. The Ninth Amendment recognizes that people possess rights beyond those specifically listed in the Constitution. The 10th acknowledges that the federal government possesses only the powers granted to it.
The amendments were not afterthoughts. In fact, they addressed a concern raised by some of the Constitution’s strongest supporters. Federalists such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton worried that listing specific rights might inadvertently endanger others.
“It has been objected also against a bill of rights that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration,” Madison said, warning that rights not singled out could be viewed as “insecure.”
The Ninth Amendment was intended to prevent exactly that.
“The people have rights, and it’s a government predicated upon popular rights and individual rights, and not limited to amendments one through eight by any means,” Williams said.
Where the Ninth addresses the people’s rights, the 10th speaks to government power — federal and state.
“That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton believed the states would remain a significant counterweight to federal authority. The 10th Amendment reflects that balance, reserving powers not delegated to the federal government to the states and the people.
The two amendments are not stacked one upon the other. They are a Venn diagram of individuals’ and states’ rights. The place where they overlap is federal authority.
They also help us establish rules for things that haven’t happened yet.
The Founding Fathers could not have envisioned many of the changes that would reshape the nation over the last 250 years. Cars changed the way people travel. Telephones changed the way they communicate. Computers changed almost every aspect of daily life.
Yet Americans still expect to have rights that protect their privacy, property and personal choices. The Ninth Amendment acknowledges that those rights do not disappear simply because they were not specifically listed in 1791.
Likewise, the 10th Amendment recognizes that new challenges do not automatically create new federal powers. Questions about who should act — Washington, Harrisburg or local government — continue to be debated as the country changes.
In construction, those debates are settled by sight lines, stakes and agreed-upon landmarks that define parameters — all things decided by surveyors and documented in deeds.
A survey doesn’t tell builders what to construct. It tells them where they may build.
The Ninth and 10th Amendments perform a similar function. More than 230 years after they were ratified, they continue to mark the boundaries between liberty and authority, between the people, the states and the federal government.