Bill of Rights Day: How Your Rights Keep Authoritarianism in Check

In these fraught political times when our political choices are largely limited to authoritarian Republicans and totalitarian Democrats and federal agencies vie for opportunities to violate individual rights, it’s difficult to feel anything other than contempt for government. It’s worth remembering, though, that the current mess isn’t a good representation of the Founding ideals of our republic. In particular, consider the protections for liberty embodied in the Bill of Rights, which is celebrated every December 15.

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Remarkably, the main opposition to including specific protections for the Bill of Rights came not from those who thought the document went too far, but from people who feared it didn’t go far enough.

James Madison, then a representative in Congress decades before his election to the White House, believed rights are natural and preexist any form of government. Man “has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person,” he commented in a 1792 newspaper column. “Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right.” Protecting specific rights, he feared, might lead Americans to believe those were their only rights, and that they’re granted by government.

Madison argued that the new federal government was already constrained to exercise only specific powers and had no authority to invade individual rights. “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined,” he wrote in Federalist Papers 45.

Madison’s friend and mentor, Thomas Jefferson, shared his faith that natural rights exist beyond the bounds of what government allows. In an 1819 letter Jefferson wrote that “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

That was long after he’d prevailed upon Madison in their correspondence to consider that the new Constitution assigns significant authority to the federal legislative and executive branches and should “guard us against their abuses of power.”

“If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can” with a formal Bill of Rights, he continued. While such a document “is not absolutely efficacious under all circumstances, it is of great potency always, and rarely inefficacious.”

Madison was persuaded by such arguments and ultimately became known as the father of the Bill of Rights we know today. He proposed 12 amendments, of which the 10 with which we are most familiar were ratified on December 15, 1791 (another, delaying the effect of congressional pay raises until after the next election, finally was approved in 1992 as the 27th Amendment). The Ninth Amendment addressed Madison’s concerns about protecting only some rights by embedding his natural rights ideas in the document. It states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” December 15 is now celebrated as Bill of Rights Day.

So, how is the Bill of Rights holding up? It’s had its ups and downs. Government has frequently encroached upon liberty in the United States in ways big and small. Infamously, it took a civil war to end slavery, critics of government policy suffered censorship through several wars, private businesses have several times been nationalized in the name of national security, and Japanese Americans were interned during the panic-stricken days of World War II. Inevitably, politicians are almost always enemies of the restrictions the 10 amendments place on government power because they’re intended to circumscribe political ambitions and, when properly enforced, do just that.

Unfortunately, the American people themselves can be ambivalent about the rights protected by those ten amendments. Last year, polling by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that “61% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans at least slightly agree that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” And while Americans generally support the right to keep and bear arms in the broad sense, Pew Research finds that “about six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) favor stricter gun laws” including banning “assault-style weapons” (semiautomatic rifles ) and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds—laws that would be impossible to reconcile with the Second Amendment.

Then again, Americans aren’t especially consistent. In October 2025, polling by Associated Press-NORC revealed that majorities of Americans believe freedom of speech (78 percent), freedom of the press (76 percent), the right to vote (58 percent), and the right to keep and bear arms (64 percent) face at least minor threats in the United States.

Hey, folks! Have you met yourselves?

Fortunately, the Bill of Rights has a way of reasserting itself even when some protections have seemingly faded into impotence. The censorship of World War I revived interest in the First Amendment and brought about what some have termed the “Free Speech Century.” Creeping restrictions and outright bans on private ownership of weapons also seemed to have bypassed the right to keep and bear arms until public outrage joined with legal scholarship to reinvigorate the Second Amendment. Unlike the tepid protections in various other countries protections for rights, the often absolute language in the U.S. Bill of Rights always retains the potential to reawaken and strike down restrictive laws.

But it’s a never-ending struggle between advocates of liberty and their opponents.

On Bill of Rights Day in 2009, Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute wrote, “The Framers of the Constitution would not have been surprised by the relentless attempts by government to expand its sphere of control.” They knew the limits of paper protections. But, as Jefferson urged, “they nevertheless concluded that putting safeguards down on paper was better than having nothing at all.”

We Americans can be our own worst enemies when it comes to liberty. We fear politicians of one party but place unreasonable trust in those from another, even though they’re drawn from the same power-hungry mold. Too often, that means our support for restrictions on government is situational and subject to change with the outcome of the next election.

But the Bill of Rights remains to limit the depredations on freedom of politicians from all parties, as well as their supporters among the public. Remember to celebrate that document on Bill of Rights Day.