Aug 21, 2026

The Ninth Amendment is the one the Supreme Court almost never uses, and constitutional scholar Bill Norton says that is because we have been reading it wrong since the day it was written. In this bonus conversation with Jenny Beth Martin, Norton walks through the amendment scholars now call forgotten. The Ninth Amendment says the enumeration of rights in the Constitution shall not be construed to deny others. Norton's point is easy to miss: the Bill of Rights did not exist yet when those words were written, so "enumerated in the Constitution" cannot mean the ten amendments. It means the entire document. James Madison put it to George Washington: protecting rights and limiting powers are two sides of the same coin. Read it that way and every stretched power becomes a taken right. The hour also covers the natural law principle behind the Second Amendment, why the founders abandoned religious tolerance in favor of freedom of conscience, John Adams on how mixing religion and government corrupts both, the trial of William Penn and the jury that would not convict, jury nullification and the acquittal no judge can overturn, the consent principle buried in the Third Amendment, and what Madison's most misquoted letter says about an Article Five convention. Bill Norton is a constitutional scholar and the author of Behind the Bill of Rights, co-authored with Jeremy Nelson of the National Center for Constitutional Studies. He has studied the founding principles for about thirty five years. More at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.

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