Saving the Bill of Rights:
Exposing the Left's Campaign to Destroy American Exceptionalism
by Frank Miniter

Frank Miniter believes that the Bill of Rights is under attack. His book's subhead is Exposing the Left's Campaign to Destroy American Exceptionalism, and that's exactly what this book does. Miniter describes how our liberties expressly protected in the Bill of Rights are being eroded and ignored by leftist politicians, activist judges, and special-interest groups.

Liberals pretend to be champions of individual rights and liberties, but Miniter explains that isn't so. They are actually chipping away at the foundational freedoms that make America exceptional.

Liberals have used advances in technology to justify undermining the protection against unreasonable searches and seizure found in the Fourth Amendment, but Miniter rejects the notion that new technology makes the Bill of Rights obsolete. Just because the Founders didn't know about airplanes and the internet doesn't mean that we no longer need our constitutional right to be secure against unreasonable searches.

Miniter has a chapter on each of the ten amendments, spelling out why the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, might be the most important of the ten; how the Fifth, our right to own property, is at risk from government taking people's homes to give to other private persons or businesses because they are expected to pay higher taxes; and the Ninth, which acknowledges our natural rights, has been deliberately misread in order to increase government power.

Miniter explains what's behind many current controversies about our rights and liberties, such as: how the liberals are using their slogan of "net neutrality" to stifle free speech; why the Founders would be appalled at how "separation of church and state" (a phrase not in the First Amendment) has been twisted to drive Christianity, and even God, out of the public square; how the liberals have repeatedly violated the Tenth Amendment, and how restoring its true meaning could help preserve some of our liberties.

Unfortunately, there's not enough space in the book to address all the attacks on our Bill of Rights liberties. There is so much more to the Fifth Amendment than property rights, and so much more to the Sixth Amendment than the right to a jury trial. The rights of due process, to be confronted with the witnesses against an accused, to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel are regularly ignored by our family courts.

(Regnery Publishing Co., 2011, 344 pp., $27.95)