That we should abandon the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights is a document that not only promotes outdates conceptions of our human rights, but also is also designed so that the common will of the people are not followed. Although the Bill of Rights was designed with the intention of protecting human rights, it has done the opposite, harming both our democratic and other rights. I thank my opponent for accepting this debate and the definitions that I put forward. I wish him the best of luck in this debate. Today, on team Pro, I will be putting forward three major arguments for the Bill of Rights to be abolished-that is is unnecessary and that our important rights are already protected, that it is a basically undemocratic document and that it harms our rights. If these arguments are to be believed, as I will argue, we should abolish the Bill of Rights. Argument One-The Bill of Rights is entirely unnecessary If the Bill of Rights were removed, America’s human rights would remain intact, as they are protected by numerous other sources-specifically, our rights are already sufficiently protected in three other ways. Firstly, we can see that valuable human rights would be protected both by common law and by legislature that has already been implemented-for example, the Fourth Amendment protecting against unlawful search and seizure is protected in most nations by internal police regulation and by common law denoting that unlawfully obtained evidence cannot usually be used in court. The Bill of Rights is entirely unnecessary because its job is done by our established common and legislative law systems and codes. Secondly, these human rights are also protected by the international community. America’s membership of the UN and of certain international treaties is dependant upon their upholding certain human rights standards-if they were to be broken, America would be attacked by the international community and would likely suffer through being removed from trade agreements. Thirdly, they are protected by the people. As I will expand on later, our human rights are and should be protected by the democratic representatives of the people of America-if there were violations of valuable human rights, then the party doing so would be promptly removed from government. A political party would be unlikely to pursue this sort of course of action because they would realise the electoral consequences and work hard to make sure they didn’t suffer from them. Thus, our human rights are early protected by our legal systems, our international relations and the democratic systems in place-the Bill of Rights is entirely unnecessary. Argument Two-The Bill of Rights is undemocratic The mechanism by which the BOR supposedly protects human rights is that decisions made by the government may be challenged and overturned in court. This means that power is, instead of being given to the people, given to unelected judges and those who wrote and approved it over 200 years ago. The decision to award and restrict rights should go to the people for three reasons. Firstly, in the same way that the people should be able to vote for whichever representative they want, it is unfair that we live under documents that government our lives without the consent of the governed. Secondly, the people should be able to choose when to regulate certain rights because they know better than rigid documents when rights need to be restricted-for example, in a time of war, it may be necessary to restrict the 1st Amendment, which states that congress may not abridge the freedom of the press; when there are great dangers to national security, it should be up to the people of that nation to make these choices because they know their own circumstances best. Thirdly, because rights are not objective realities but rather subjective concepts that may change over time, we should allow the common people to make decisions over which rights need to be protected and which do not. For these three reasons, we can see that it is the common people that should make decisions about the role of the government in their lives-this is something that the Bill of Rights restricts because it hands over these sorts of decisions to the courts and to old documents rather than the people. I expect my opponent to claim that the Bill of Rights, too, can be changed by the vote of the people. However, this is extremely difficult for a few reasons. Firstly, it would have to pass both the senate and the house of representatives by a majority of two thirds of the overall number of votes. This step is extremely improbable-for an amendment to be passed under our current congress, there would need to be bipartisan consent from both parties. Further, it seems extremely unlikely that any party would be able to manage to hold such a large majority of both houses. Second, after this, it would have to be agreed to by three quarters of the states-something that is similarly quite unlikely due to large blocs of states whose allegiances normally move towards one party. Furthermore, even if the process by which the Bill of Rights is changed was not in itself something that would delay progress, it is also unlikely to be changed even due to popular will because voters may be swayed by rhetoric surrounding the changes that would have to be made to the Bill of Rights. In this way, the Bill of Rights takes away power from the people because decisions go to unelected judges and possible amendments have to jump through various hoops and meet an extraordinarily high standard of support. On the Pro side, we believe democratic governments shouldn’t discourage reform in this way-they should leave important choices to the will of the common people. Argument Three-The Bill of Rights hurts human rightsThis takes place in two ways. Firstly, it promotes a system of frozen rights-as I have explained, the Bill of Rights means that reforms are likely not to take place. Apart from this being fundamentally undemocratic, it also means that certain concepts of rights are preserved over time when they should not be-for example, the one argument commonly put forward against gun control is that it would be unconstitutional because gun rights are protected under the Bill of Rights, even though the original context of these restrictions on the government’s regulation on gun control were entirely different from those in our contemporary society. However, on the Pro side of this debate, we believe old conceptions of rights should not be considered as arguments against changing our own laws-using the example of gun control, we should decide based on our own circumstances, not on the entirely different circumstances of our predecessors. For this reason, the Bill of Rights hurts human rights in that it encourages frozen rights-old conceptions of rights that nonetheless influence our own decisions today. Secondly, keeping the Bill of Rights means that we have become more and more complacent about human rights in our nation. The Bill of Rights is often considered as a strong protection against human rights abuses-however, because we feel that our human rights are already protected by such documents, the American public is less interested in human rights abuses that are not documented by the Bill of Rights such as that of the torture that took place in Guantanamo Bay. In these two ways, the Bill of Rights harms human rights in America. The Bill of Rights is a defunct document-it is unnecessary, undemocratic and unhelpful. I urge voters to support abolishing the Bill of Rights and ensuring that we no longer live under such an outdated conception of human rights.