While speaking with Sen. Ted Cruz (R) on the Verdict podcast, Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out the Second Amendment “assumes the right, it doesn’t grant a right.”
Thomas said this while making the overarching point the source of rights is God not government; that our rights pre-existed our U.S. government and even the U.S. itself.
He said, “It matters if you think the government is the primary granter of rights and you receive rights and benefits from the government, versus you have the rights and the government receives its authority from you.”
Thomas stressed that we must remember that our rights “that are antecedent, that are transcendent,” and pointed to Justice Antonin Scalia’s writings “on the structure of the constitution…[which is] a safeguard on these rights that you have.”
On April 30, 2017, Breitbart News pointed to the Declaration of Independence, which says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
It is crucial to note two things in this portion of the Declaration: 1. Thomas Jefferson sourced our rights in our “Creator,” not in government or in a majority vote of the population. 2. Jefferson sourced government’s power in the people. In other words, governments possess powers, not rights, and the U.S. government only has power because the people lend it a portion of the authority that they possess by birth.
Flashback — Justice Clarence Thomas on Standing for The Truth
Moreover, the authority which the people lend government never communicates permission to infringe on the rights with which the people were endowed. (This is why James Madison used Federalist 46 to stress that “ultimate authority…resides in the people alone.”)
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected].
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