Constitutional rights?

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RESTORING THE LOST CONSTITUTION: THE PRESUMPTION OF LIBERTY

Randy E. Barnett

Princeton University Press, $32.50, 381 pages

In 1787, the Founding Fathers forged a bulwark of freedom, the U.S. Constitution, with its Bill of Rights ratified in 1791. In 1878, British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone called it "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man," in an apparent try to distinguish it from the God-given Ten Commandments.

But Randy Barnett, the libertarian Austin B. Fletcher professor of law at Boston University, author of the "The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law" and an originalist in interpreting the Constitution, charges that you and the Constitution have suffered over its 217 years of existence from various amendments such as the 16th (income tax) Amendment and the 17th (Direct Election of Senators) Amendment, both of which were ratified in 1913.

Too, in Mr. Barnett's remarkable historical overview, loose Supreme Court "living document" interpretations have eroded otherwise invaluable government safeguards, including the Ninth and 10th Amendments, theCommerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Privileges or Immunities Clause (of the 14th Amendment), the Second Amendment via "gun control," and the Takings Clause in the Fifth Amendment via unwise readings of "eminent domain."

Upshot per our author: The Constitution, based on the Founders' presumption of liberty and natural rights (recall Thomas Jefferson citing "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence), has been lost. A sorry situation, yet not an irretrievable one.

"Restoring the Lost Constitution" then is a hopeful work -- provocative, documented, resolute, reasoned, readable -- delightfully devoid of legalistic obtuseness. It lights up a road back to limited government, albeit a steep road.