Ninth Amendment was mentioned in the famous “penumbras” section of Roe v. Wade citing Griswold v. Connecticut.
In Alaska, IIRC, it’s illegal to pass by a stranded motorist without stopping to offer assistance because in the winter the situation could be life threatening.
Just thought I’d throw that out there.
I agree completely with Procacious. Tax was meant for community projects like roads, schools, firemen, etc… and NOT to distribute money amongst citizens. I think it’s a crime that my friend who works 70 hour weeks at a successful contracting job has to spend 30 hours (almost a full work week) just to pay his taxes! Why can’t everyone pay the same percentage - that way people with more will pay more, but not an intolerable amount!
Also, there is the drug issue. Someone alluded to a previous thread about the state’s rights to legalize marijuana. The main issue is state’s rights (though I doubt they really exist). It seems now that the only rights the state has are the ones the gov’t doesn’t have time to address. For example, here in Louisiana, the drinking age for the longest time was 18. It’s the state’s right to choose what the drinking age should be, so the federal gov’t couldn’t change it. However, they DID threaten to stop all federal funding for roads in Louisiana - including interstaes - if the drinking age was not raised AND enforced. Well, now you have to be 21 to drink here.
The federal government has crossed the line between protecting citizens and controlling citizens. That has to change!
An interesting annotation of the Ninth Amendment at Findlaw
A conservative stance on Ninth Amendment rights.
Legal philosophy based on the Ninth Amendment discussed, with particular reference to “creative jurisprudence”
A PDF listing of books by Ninth Amendment scholar Calvin Massey
An ALA page quoting James Madison and listing Supreme Court cases focusing on the right to privacy (often citing the Ninth)
“Reconceiving the Ninth Amendment” by Randy Barnett, Professor of Law, in Cornell Law Review
“http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1”]Loving v. Virginia, which deals with a “right to marry” as against a state miscegenation law, and therefore depends on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection under the law. Had this been dealing with federal law, the Ninth rather than the Fourteenth would probably have come into play.
Dang polycarp! You do your research!
In 1894, Congress passed an income tax law, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional {POLLOCK v. FARMERS’ LOAN & TRUST CO., 157 U.S. 429 (1895)}. That is why the 16th amendment was passed. Here is a link to the case.
I am not saying that all taxes are unconstitutional, but the 16th amendment was passed to remove a right that the constitution was meant to protect. That upsets me greatly.
True, but I operate under the default position that you have the right to do any given thing unless an extremely good reason is found why you shouldn’t. That is my interpretation of the 9th amendment. Things should not be declared illegal on the whim of a law-making body.
The 9th amendment states that just because you cannot find grounds for a right elsewhere in the constitution does not mean that right does not exist. Any right that does not violate someone else’s constitutional rights should be protected under the 9th amendment (according to my interpretation, but obviously the vagueness of the amendment makes almost any interpretation possible).
Yeah, I remember sighing in disappointment when I first heard that one.
The federal government threatened every state with that which is why you need to be 21 to drink in almost every state.
And thanks a lot for adding all those sites. I have always been awful at finding sites on the internet. It seems like some of my friends practically wrote their whole dissertations from internet material (well no, not really), but I feel fortunate to find a single site on any subject I look for. Either I only look for rare things on the internet or there is a special search engine that all people know to use except me. 
I can find anything I want at a library, but put me on the internet and I can’t find pornography. 
And it doesn’t say or even imply that that right does exist.
I don’t see anything vague about the Amendment - that’s why I’m confused by this discussion. It simply states “a truism,” as the Supreme Court pointed out.
The authors of the Constitution did an incredible job of making a document that was quite complete, yet still very short (heck, some of my posts are longer than the Constitution). If the authors were partial to adding “truisms” to the Constitution, it would be hundreds of pages long. I do not believe that they put the 9th amendment in just because it sounded nice and 10 amendments looked better than only 9. I believe they put it in there because they knew there were far too many rights to list in the Constitution and so they added a single amendment to protect all of these rights.
As I understand it, the Constitution did not originally have rights in it (i.e. it had to be amended) because the authors felt that after escaping from under the thumb of England the people would never want a large federal government again. They didn’t feel it necessary to list rights, because no American government would ever even try to trample them. This is the land of the free after all. Little did they know that the only rights we have today are the ones they listed and the 9th amendment is mostly ignored anyway.
Repealing the Ninth Amendment makes about as much sense as repealing the Preamble. Neither has much direct impact, but their absence would change the flavor of the document – and thus how the documents are interpreted – and would thus be a Bad Idea.
The Supreme Court has held that several rights – most notably, the right of privacy and the right of interstate travel – are in fact protected by the Constitution without being mentioned explicitly. These rights are captured not by the Ninth Amendment (which, because of its negative phrasing, is not capable of affirming any right at all) but by the Fourteenth, under the doctrine of modern substantive due process, and thus also the Fifth (Fourteenth for state law, Fifth for federal law). The path by which the Court got to the modern doctrine is complicated and was definitely influenced by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments even if neither is routinely cited in arguments for such rights today.
That said, trying to rest a legal argument on the Ninth Amendment alone is bound to get you labeled a loonie. The Ninth Amendment is raised almost solely by loonies who don’t know enough constitutional law to recognize that (a) the Ninth Amendment guarantees no specific rights, (b) just because you claim something as a right doesn’t mean it is a right, and © rights which are “fundamental freedoms” are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment moreso than the Ninth. (The Fourteenth has teeth; the Ninth does not.) Invoking the Ninth Amendment as a legal argument, without also invoking Griswold or a “fundamental freedom” claim, is right on a par with complaining about the fringe on the flag in the courtroom.
BTW, Polycarp, it’s the Fifth Amendment that would protect any putative “right to marry” from federal interference, not the Ninth. I base this on the fact that it was the Fifth Amendment that was found to prohibit federally-operated schools from discriminating on the basis of race. (The Fourteenth Amendment, you will note, has no application to federal action.)
Procacious, your ignorance of Constitutional history is alarming. Hie thee to a library and do some heavy reading, starting perhaps with the Federalist Papers and some of the other contemporary commentary to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. I might also suggest a casebook on constitutional law.
I’m still not getting how repealing these would actually help anyone.
Amendments to the constitution are meant … to amend the constitution. Where is it written in the constitution that amendments are meant only to grant new rights and not to repeal old ones?
Why shouldn’t we be able to repeal anything we don’t like? We would be in an undemocratic society if we had a constitution that we could not change. That would be a dictatorship.
The Enumerated Powers Doctrine is interpreted by strict constructionists as limiting the federal government to those powers listed in the Constitution. So, a reasonable person might assume that rights are treated in the same way. In other words since marriage is not listed in the Constitution, you have no right to get married. This is what the Ninth Amendment was written to prevent.
There are rights derived from the British Common Law and tradition that the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect without having to list them. This is where “rules of construction” come in. The Ninth Amendment is basically a rule of construction. It says, “just because a right is not here does not mean it does not exist.”
Rules of construction are used to help people interpret statutes (or constitutions).
[sub]Psst!, nobody is really suggesting that we repeal the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.[/sub]
I think the OP was talking about using the ninth amendment at all, not exclusively.
Also, I’m sure my conception is unclear but isn’t the ninth amendment itself a recognition of “fundamental freedoms”. I know lawyers got to fill up there closing statements but it seems redundant.
ps Kellyb, can we trust your interpretation of the constitution when you can’t even tell when Procacious is being so blatantly facetious? Hie thee to an English lit course. 
Note to self: Never again start a debate thread with a sarcastic title.
I apologize again for the confusion this has created.
I am assuming that this comment is also a result of the misinterpretation of my position due to my failure to be clear and my deceptive thread title (though deception was not my intent). If there is something else that led you to write this comment please let me know what it was specifically and I will try to address it.
Being labeled a loony does not make the person’s position any less valid. Obviously the 9th amendment has a lot of room for interpretation (which is why so many people have completely opposite views on what it stands for). There are those that believe that it has no power at all and those that believe it has an incredible amount of power if only the courts would enforce it. Since the rights that are most frequently brought up with regards to the 9th amendment were not taken away until after all of the Constitution’s authors died, we really have no one to ask. No one that knows exactly what the 9th amendment was designed to protect is alive to answer our questions. Our own personal interpretations are all that we have. And though I agree that 14th amendment currently has more power than the 9th, I believe that the 9th amendment should be far more powerful than any other amendment including the 14th. Its power is in its vagueness (and obviously others feel that its weakness is in its vagueness).
The Constitution was designed to state how our government is to operate. The first 10 amendments were added to point out that people in America have rights that the government is not to infringe upon. To remove these rights is to change the very thing that the first 10 amendments were put in place to protect. If the government can just remove these rights when it pleases, there is no reason to have the amendments at all. I agree that the ability to add amendments to point out new rights is important in our society (or to repeal restrictions if you want to look at it from the other side), but the ability to repeal rights that the Constitution protects changes what our country is based on.