Second Through Tenth Amendment Explained: Our Constitution is still alive and applicable today! As citizens, we all have a duty to study the Constitution, to understand where our rights and our freedoms are laid out in that document, and how our government structure should work. The reason our government continues to overstep its boundaries is that “we the people” don’t know what those boundaries are! Tune in now for the last part of our three-part series! 

Air Date: 08/09/2019



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Faith And The Culture



We’re here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and the founder of WallBuilders. Also, Tim Barton, national speaker and President of WallBuilders, and my name is Rick Green, I’m a former Texas state legislator, national speaker, and author. You’ve joined us in a three part series on the Constitution, it’s actually just one section out of the full Constitution Alive program, which is eleven or twelve hours.

It’s available now at 

Open up your home and share it with your friends or family. Get them educated on the Constitution. Today we’re going to finish off one particular section out of that full program. It’s Section 9, dealing with the Bill of Rights. 

Yesterday and the day before we had the first two parts in this three part series. Today we get a conclusion, and then you can grab all three pieces right there on our website and share it with your friends and family.

Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday with Constitution Alive. 


Sam Adams says this, “The Constitution should never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.” Really?

I don’t think we’re listening to that right. He says it should never be constrained. Ever. 


Why is there even a debate on this? These quotes are not wishy washy. They’re not muddy. They’re clear.

What Did the Founders Have to Say?


He’s one of the chief guys in Massachusetts that caused the ratification of the Constitution. It almost failed there because he wanted protections for individual rights. So as George Mason did of Virginia, Sam Adams is a big leader in Massachusetts. And this is what the real emphasis on, “We want these limitations around the government, and the Constitution should never be construed.” 

That’s why we put the Second Amendment. 

Then you look at Patrick Henry. 

Patrick Henry says, “The great object is that every man be armed, everyone who is able may have a gun.” 

We’re trying to make that as hard as possible. 

Richard Henry Lee, the guy who made the motion Congress is separate from Great Britain, he’s a framer the Bill of Rights. He is one of the framers in Congress of this amendment. 

This is what he said.


Teaching kids? These guys are radicals!

We’re supposed to teach it to the rising generation. Remember, John Jay said, “Teach these rights to the rising generation.” 

These rights include the right to keep and bear arms. Teach it to the rising generation. And as John Quincy Adams pointed out, the sooner you do that, the less gun accidents you’ll have, right? 

Accidents happen from being unfamiliar with it. Accidents happen when you get behind the wheel of a car and you don’t have the experience and drive it, or when you don’t have experience with guns and you pick one up because you’re curious about it. 

“A Free People Aught to be Armed”

That’s what that’s what they’re doing. 

George Washington has said this. 

“A free people ought to be armed.” 

Real simple. 

Then you’ve got James Madison, James Madison said, “The advantage of being armed is an advantage which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. In the several kingdoms the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. Not here.” 

 We see this with a lot of Justices on the Supreme Court justices. 

“Oh, don’t copy the American Constitution. Be more like Europe. They’re so progressive, and they’ve got cool cars. They’re so cool.” 

I love how the Founding Fathers back then, with the same pressure to be sophisticated, to be like Europe, look at what Thomas Jefferson said about this about being like Europe. Love this. 

He says, “The comparisons of our governments with those of Europe are like a comparison of Heaven and Hell.”


That’s a big difference!


Exactly right.

In Europe, they don’t want you to have guns. Because in Europe, again, they were secular governments. So the government was God. In America, no, the government is to serve the people. God is God. People serve God and government serves people.

And these guys knew the difference. They come out from under that. Been there done that. 


Why—today do we look at Europe as how we want to be. Why can’t we learn from our Founding Fathers? 


We can’t, if we ever studied history. And that’s what we’re doing here. 

And here’s what Jefferson said about the Second Amendment. 

“No citizen shall be debarred the use of arms within his own lands.” 

Again, it’s unalienable right. You can’t take it away. 

John Adams says it this way. 

God Given Rights Are Non Returnable

“Resistance to sudden violence for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and my life, but (also) my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which, perhaps, I could not surrender if I would.” 

In other words, you can’t give up your natural rights. It’s like saying, “I give up the right to gravity.” 

You can’t give up the right to gravity if it’s a God given right. You don’t give it back.


It looks like he’s saying that resistance to sudden violence is my resistance. That said, it’s not just that. You can’t have police on every corner, and not going to be in every home. So if I’m going to have that resistance a sudden violence, I cannot give up. 


That’s right.

He said, “The maxims of the law and the precepts of Christianity precisely coexistant in relation to the subject.” 

Weather you want to go to the laws of nature or the laws of nature’s God, you take it either way. You want to go to the Bible? I’ve got the right of self-defense, that’s in Exodus 22. 

If you want to go to the laws of nature, I’ve got the right of self-defense. I can’t give up the right of self-defense because it doesn’t belong to me, it came from God. 

I don’t give it up. 

Look at Alexander Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton said, “The Supreme Being gave existence of man together with the means of preserving that existence. He invested man with an inviolable right to personal liberty and personal safety.” 

So now you have a right to be free. You have a right to be safe. 

The Right to Personal Liberty and Safety

“The Supreme Being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving that existence invested man within an inviolable, inalienable right to personal liberty and personal safety.” 

You have a right to freedom, but you have a right to be safe with that freedom. 

I could give a lot more, but you get the point. Everybody gets the point here. This was some big stuff to them and giving it up is not small.

Let me credential James Wilson for just a minute. James Wilson is no lightweight among the Founding Fathers. He’s one of the six guys who signed the Declaration and the Constitution, he’s the second most active member of the Constitutional Convention, which means he’s involved in every debate, every development, and they liked what he said, because he’s considered a master builder of the Constitution. 

He had so many inputs that they said, “Yeah, makes sense.” 

So he starts the first organized law school in America. 

That’s pretty cool for the guy who had that much influence, to say, “I want to teach the next generation these principles in our Constitution.” 

I actually have his—over in the library—his original law books that he wrote. George Washington put him on the U.S. Supreme Court as an original justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. So Washington, who was in the convention, saw what he did and said, “You need to be on the court.”

James Wilson, the First Chief Justice


So wait, let me think about this. If I were writing the resumé for someone that I would consider to be an expert on the Constitution, they gave us the Declaration, the Constitution, and served on the Supreme Court, I don’t think you can get any better than that. 

That’s really impressive.


And that’s one of the cool things about the original justice, because under Article 3, the only thing that is required is to have a Supreme Court, as you pointed out, Congress can constitutionally reduce the Supreme Court to nothing more than a Chief Justice at a card table with a candle. 

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Congress Controls the Courts


The Constitution doesn’t say how many justices to have. 

So the original Congress said, “President Washington, we’ll give you a chief justice and we’ll give you five associate justices. You choose them.”

So he chooses six folks to be on the court. Three of those six signed the Constitution, two those six ratified the Constitution, and one of the six wrote the Federalist Papers. 

I’m going to think that they probably understood what is Constitution, because they are the ones that wrote it. That’s why, when you can use their legal commentaries, and their input, and their interpretation. Now you’re starting to see exactly how they designed it, and they showed us how it’s supposed to be applied. In case it wasn’t clear to us, they’ve made it clear. 

So look what he says about Second Amendment issues. This is this is really cool. 

“The great natural law of self preservation cannot be repealed, or superseded, or suspended by any human institution.” 

That’s pretty clear no government can take away your right to defend you.


That is clearly an inalienable right. You cannot take that away.


“The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves shall not be questioned.”

Not only can not take it away, you don’t even get to question it.

That’s off limits for government to even mess with. 

It continues, “As every man’s house is deemed by the law to be his castle, and the law invests time with the power and places on him the duty of the commanding officer of this house.” 

Every Man’s House is his Castle


It’s not the police’s responsibility, it’s ours. 


This is the castle doctrine. 

“Every man’s house is his castle, and if anyone would be robbed in it, it shall be a state his own default and negligence.” 


If you get robbed in your house, don’t you blame the cops for not getting there fast enough. You’re in charge of defending your house. That’s a law of nature, and a law of nature’s God. If you don’t do it you’re at fault. If you get robbed, it’s your fault.


That’s the Second Amendment. 


I wish though, David, that you had more than just one or two things. I don’t know how many. You even said it earlier, you said, “I’m going to pile it on. I’m really going to put this into the ground,” 

That’s what we need to do we need to do! We need to know this was so overwhelming!

Those are not little quotes, those are strong, strong, quotes, and people need to know they’re like this on nearly every issue. 


Yeah. As we talked about—even is a business too big to fail? Should federal government bailout of private business? They’ve been there, done that. So many things that we deal with. They have already dealt with.


Yeah. I bet you that people that are watching this have have felt in their gut the truth about some of these issues. But they haven’t had that ammunition—no pun intended to the topic. So they haven’t had all of that evidence to pile on to that gut feeling, and now they’re getting it. 

I guarantee you. I know because they come up and tell us all the time after presentation. “Wow. Now I know what I felt in my gut is right.” 

Being Honest About the Constitution

We’ve just got to draw it out.


Yeah. And the cool thing is we’re able to do that. That’s why these things exist. That’s why we have what we have here. From an intellectually honest standpoint, if people want to say, “I don’t care what they wanted, I want something different.” 

OK, let’s have that debate. But don’t ever tell me the Founding Fathers didn’t want this to be what Constitution intended. That’s why we have this. 

If you want to be honest with me and say, “I don’t care a flip what the Constitution says or what they want. Here’s the way I want to discuss it.” 

All right, let’s go to that point. Let’s see who wins that. 

But so often the courts say, “You know? The Founding Fathers said, or the Founding Fathers interpreted this amendment to mean this.”


That’s why it’s so good to come back here, and that’s why we used to have a good public education on government, because it would bring out all the education that you’ve got here in the library. 

Let’s hit the Fourth Amendment. 


We went over this lightly at Philadelphia, but I’d love to get more founders’ quotes on this. OK. So, Fourth Amendment. 

A lot of people have been asking, “Is the fourth amendment being violated with some of the things we do in airports and what not?” 


Persons, Houses, Papers, and Effects


All right, keep that in mind. We’re going to come back to it.

What were the four categories that said? 


Persons, houses, papers, and effects. OK, now what’s an effect? 


An effect? 


Yeah, I don’t know affects.


Those are the things you own. Our property. 

Let’s go back to understand. We talked earlier about to understand the Constitution you have to understand the Declaration.

That is the result of the Declaration grievance against writs of assistance. Now, writs of assistance, really interesting stuff. 

See, the British run on monopolies, and the British wanted to tax the dickens out of you. So you’re not allowed free market competition. 

The British will send you sugar. 

“Well, I can get sugar out of a different place for one third the price.” 

“No, you will buy our sugar.” 

So there was a sugar act, and a molasses act, and all this other stuff that said, “You don’t get to compete, you will buy what we send you at the prices we give you.” 

Well, that’s where black market smuggling went up, and that’s where a lot of these guys would go up to Canada and come back and sell in the United States for money. Anywhere you have a monopoly, it’s because the government is involved. 

The government busts monopolies? No, the government creates monopolies. Free market busts monopolies. 


So your government protects monopolies? 


That’s right. The government protects monopolies by eliminating competition. So what happened was you had all these Americans who were in violation of British laws. 

The British Monopoly

“Well, I’m sorry, that violates the laws of nature. You can’t tell a racoon that you can only get food from this tray if a raccoon wants the food out of this tray. You can go where you get the best food.” 

So this monopoly stuff follows the law of, “You get competition all over nature. Any animal will go where it wants, squirrels go to whatever trees have the best amount of nuts for them.”

The British have now made a lot of Americans into criminals by this black market stuff. So how do you punish that? 

“Well, we’re gonna go search your house and see if you’ve got some illegal sugar in there, you don’t have the right king’s seal on your sugar, or your molasses, or your butter, or whatever it is.” 

The way they did that was with writs of assistance. 

So the British come knocking at your door and say, “I have a judicially issued warrant to search your house.” 

“Well, what are you searching for?” 

“We don’t know, but we’re going to search your house.” 

So they take the judicial warrant and they go in and look, and look, and, look, and finally under the fourth bedroom, below the third pillow, they find a cube of sugar. 

They then fill out the warrant they were searching for illegal sugar in your house and then arrest and haul you off. 

Probable Cause

Now, the Founding Fathers said, “Wait a minute, you’re making us condemn ourselves. You’re you’re coming into our homes looking to find something wrong. You don’t know that anything’s wrong, but you think there might be something wrong, so you’re coming into our home you’re searching our persons, our houses, our papers, and our effects trying to find something. We’re not going to have that, we’re going to tell you.” 

And read it again. 


They say, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no more shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.” 


So you don’t get an open warrant to come in and search. You have to have probable cause. You have to have pretty compelling belief that there’s something illegal there, and you have to specifically say what you’re looking for. 

So when that British guy knocks and says, “You know, 24 of your neighbors have testified that you have a legal sugar here, and I know where it is. It’s in that closet down the hall.” 

Unless it’s something like that, you can’t search. 

Let’s understand the writs of assistance and what they’re doing. Your home is your gift from God. That’s why we have the Third Amendment, to protect the privacy of the home, that you are the head of the castle, not the government. 

Illegal Auditing

IRS knocks at your door and says, “We’re here to do an audit of you.” 

“What are you gonna audit?” 

“I don’t know. Bring out the last three years you check stubs, we’ll go through till we find something wrong. Once we find something wrong, we’re going to nail you with the penalty.”


That just doesn’t sound like particularly describing. That sounds like the old anything and everything, “We know we’re looking for.”


The way the Founding Fathers did this is, “IRS agent? Great! You’re welcome to come search my check stubs just as soon as you bring a judicially issued warrant specifically listing the check stubs you want to see.” 

See, we don’t know that history, so we let all sorts of audits take place with us, and whoa! You don’t have a right to come into my home! That’s not your jurisdiction! This is my home! 

That’s why the Fourth Amendment is so interesting, because it is persons, houses, papers, and in fact anything I own, all my effects, whatever I’ve got put in the garage, whatever I got in the storage barn out back, whatever I’ve got. 

I’ve got a farm down here with three barns on it, and that’s my facts. You can’t get into it without specific delineation of what you’re looking for, and probable cause that I have what you think it is. 


We’ve allowed this to get that bad because we didn’t know about this. 

We thought, “Well yeah, I guess they have to verify people’s income and whatnot.” 

And now it’s a fiction of the law. You talked about that earlier. 

So now we think, “Well, they absolutely have the right to. They had the right to come in and identify all those things.” 

Assert the Constitution

But they really don’t.

But we know what the Constitution says, this is where you assert the Constitution.

You say, “IRS, you’re welcome to come back as soon as you bring with you a judicially issued search warrant specifically detailing things to be found on probable cause. When you get that, you can come into my business.” 

So that’s what the Founding Fathers have recently done.

Constitution Alive!




The Fifth Amendment


Man, there’s so much that we could dive into with each and every one of these. We’re scratching the surface getting right into as many as we can.

Again, like we said earlier, this is the quick start guide. We want to just give people a chance to get this thing plugged in and get it working again. 

What about the Fifth Amendment? Before we get out of this and come down on the amendment process.


Fifth Amendment is the Right of Self Incrimination. By the way, the way the audits happen now, they require you to incriminate yourself. 

You have to provide evidence. 

The Fifth Amendment says you can’t do self incriminate. The Due Process Clauses, from the Fourth through Eighth Amendments are designed to make the government prove that you’re that you’re guilty against everything you can do otherwise. You do not have to cooperate with the government. They can’t be compelled. They can bring witnesses, but you can compel witnesses to come in your favor. You have every right to make it as hard as you can for the government to prove you’re guilty. 

That’s what the due process is, because they’ve got the weight of government, all the attorneys, and they keep printing money, they don’t run out of money. You’ve got the right to make it difficult. 

So if they come to audit you, now we’re guilty of self incrimination. Well, that’s the Fifth Amendment, but also on the Fifth Amendment is the Takings Clause that says government cannot take any property without compensation. 

How Does the Government Take Property?

Now, how does government take property? Well, there’s several ways you can do it. You can do it through eminent domain. The Supreme Court changed that from public use to public purpose, and public use made it very hard for government take property, public purpose makes it very easy.


That’s a great example of the Constitution being modified by the courts without We the People. Actually, we the people didn’t do it. 

James Madison talked about other ways the government takes your property and doesn’t compensate.

You gave the Yellow Sheep Warbler example earlier. I’ve got personal experience. We had a ranch down where all this happened, and for seven years, the federal government told us we could not cut cedars on our ranch because there might be a yellow sheep warbler out there. 


I didn’t know that personally impacted you guys. 


And in that part of the country, if you can’t stay ahead of Cedars, you will lose your ranch. It will take over. They grow like weeds, each Cedar drinks about 40 gallons of water a day. They dry off the land, so we couldn’t do it. 

And you know, these are environmental folks. They’re very definitely pro evolution, and I say, “Well, what happens survival of the fittest?” 

And by the way, if that Yellow Sheep Warbler doesn’t have the sense to fly out of a tree that’s being cut down, it needs to be extinct. 

But that’s another argument. 

But nonetheless, they basically ruined our ranch because we lost control of it. We couldn’t keep our cattle grazing because we can’t cut the cedars. 

Lack of Compensation

What compensation do we get? Absolutely none. Well, the government just took our property. They took it over as if it were theirs and told us what we could and could not do. 

This is what James Madison talks about. This is not a new issue. 

He says government’s instituted protect property. Now, we’ve looked at that in several ways. 

He said, “Your conscience is property,” but it continues. 

He says, “This being the end of government. That alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.” 

Now, Thomas Jefferson said it includes your income. If you spend your time, your sweat, your blood, and your tears for income, that’s your property.

Government should protect your property, not take it.

So they held that. 

He continues and says, “It’s not a just government, nor is property secure under, where arbitrary restrictions is not a part of assistance that frees their faculties.” 

We’re talking about zoning use. 

Now it says the government comes in and tells you what you can or can’t do with your property. 

“It’s an American Heritage site! It’s part of the river act!” 

No, it’s a swamp land. 

They’re coming in now and zoning, and a lot of churches are finding this, that they’re being told that—there’s a church in Portland. Five hundred people go to church there. Great church, it’s growing church. 

Portland comes in and says, “Now, we don’t like 500 people going to church. We’ve zoned it for only 80 people, and that’s all you can have.” 

“It’s our property.” 

“Yeah, I know, but you’re using our property, and we don’t want more than 80 people in our property.” 

More Things to Consider

So that is a violation of an inalienable right. 

Then he says, “Or we’re the property which man has in his personal safety and personal liberty is violated by arbitrary stages of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” That is the Kelo decision. 

The Founding Fathers, again, are very explicit on what government is and is not to do. The Fifth Amendment, if they take your property through zoning regulations so that you can no longer use it, if they take it by saying, “You got a yellow sheep warbler out there, and you can’t use your own property,” they’ve got to compensate you for that. 

But that doesn’t happen because we don’t know what that means anymore.

But the Founders, again, were very specific. 


Even reading the Constitution, you realize you should be compensated when that property is taken. But the way they describe it, to a tee, that’s exactly what’s being violated today. Those are excellent quotes. 

So if we’ll study that again, get back into the mindset of the Founding Fathers, then when we go vote for Congressman we ought to ask them, “How do you feel about the Endangered Species Act and how it’s being used to take people’s property?” 

And at many other levels. 

But using these quotes, using the Constitution itself to make decisions about who we’re going to elect, who we’re going to put in office, that will turn this thing around. But this is all part of that we’ve got to think long term. It’s all about applying these principles, comes back to that idea of we’re going to we’ve got to read and study, we got to know it, then we will be able to defend and assert that. 

Learn About the Tenth Amendment and More With WallBuilders Live!

So when we come back in our next section, we’re gonna actually get into amendments. What can we do to make sure that the Constitution, in the original intent, is actually being enforced in our country? So in Section 10 we’ll check out the amendment process here on Constitution Alive.

Well friends, that was Constitution Alive, section 9, on the bill of rights. If you want to get the full program go to and get those DVDs and workbooks, and share it with as many people as you can. 

That’s how we’re gonna save the republic, we gotta get folks educated about the proper Constitutional Jurisdictions of government and what we the people need to be doing. Task citizens to restore that Republic and preserve that Constitution.

This was a three part series, so right now all three programs are available in the archives section on

The DVD set of the entire Constitution Alive program is available at Thank you so much for listening today, this has been WallBuilders Live.