Lysander Spooner

It is a sufficient proof that judges, who are dependent upon lawmakers for their offices and salaries, and are responsible to them by impeachment, cannot be relied on to put the least restraint upon the acts of their masters, the lawmakers.

And that this perversion of the constitution should have been sanctioned by all the judicial tribunals of the country, is also a proof, not only of the servility, audacity, and villainy of the judges, but also of the utter rottenness of…

The fact that these classes have been so successful in perverting the constitution (thus amended) from an instrument avowedly securing all men's natural rights, into an authority for utterly destroying them, is a sufficient proof that no…

Or have they, too, been perjured tyrants and traitors?

Have they all been mere blockheads, who never read this amendment, or knew nothing of its meaning?

What, also, are we to think of all the judges,--forty in all,--his associates and successors, who, for eighty years, have been telling the people that the government has all power, and the people no rights?

If he did see this force and authority, but chose to trample them under his feet, he was a perjured tyrant and traitor.

If, now, Marshall did not see, in this amendment, any legal force or authority, what becomes of his reputation as a constitutional lawyer?

Or, rather, this ninth amendment, the most important of all, seems to have been so utterly antagonistic to all his ideas of government, that he chose to ignore it altogether, and, as far as he could, to bury it out of sight.

It then became his sworn constitutional duty to scrutinize severely every act of congress, and to condemn, as unconstitutional, all that should violate any of these natural rights.

And yet now, owing to the usurpations of lawmakers and courts, the original constitution--with the worst possible construction put upon it--has been carried into effect; and the amendments have been simply cast into the waste baskets.

We can also see that, but for the prospect that important amendments would be made, specially for securing the natural rights of the people, the constitution would have been spurned with contempt, as it deserved to be.