Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito taunted Congress recently by declaring “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” His statement came after a reporter revealed that Alito had accepted expensive gifts from a billionaire who wanted special favors granted to him from the court. To others a simple Code of Ethics might be all that is necessary to prevent such cozy arrangements.

But those of us able to read, write, to think and opine know that the Constitution was not written to grant us our rights or our freedoms, rather to preserve those we already have. Examples: The right to marry, to vote, to build a house, to cross the street, to visit Montana, to walk and chew gum simultaneously, or to live our lives free from those who need a black robe to cover their bodies. The complete list is rather lengthy, but you get the picture. Most of our rights and freedoms are not listed in the Constitution. They nevertheless exist in part by the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and in the Constitution itself, in the 27th Amendments—but in the 9th and 10th Amendments in partcular.

It is a pathetic argument known as “textual originalism” first posited by the late Antonin Scalia, namely, that the Constitution “means what it meant in 1787--nothing more and nothing less.” According to this totalitarian point of view, if your activity is not mentioned in that document, you don’t have the right to do it. And the Supreme Court Justices alone have the mental, moral, and intellectual insight to be able to go back in time/space leaps to 1787 in understanding how to apply an antiquated language, facts, and circumstances to today’s issues. This is total nonsense. Word meanings change with syntax, context, setting, and hundreds of surrounding factual nuances such as voice inflections, facial changes, regional usages, colloquialisms, to name but a few. It is pseudo-intellectualism to presume that law schools and legal practices are the source for applying this time/space overarching gibberish to language. If true , then the right to bear arms would be limited today to possessing only muzzle-loading, single-shot muskets and pistols.

Neither Scalia’s nor Alito’s comment is a scholarly interpretation of a document that sets forth six purposes stated in the Preamble: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our posterity. Those words circumscribe a universe of unlisted freedoms.

The operative principle that soars over the head of Alito and his adherents is that freedom cannot exist for the many unless it is circumscribed by a set of rules that requires each of us to live by. Put another way, “My freedom ends where yours begins.” That is why neither you, nor I, nor any Supreme Court Justice is free to race our cars 100 mile per hour through the streets of Washington DC. There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits anyone from doing so. But you can believe there are city ordinances that forbid it.

Five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court today tend to agree with Scalia and Alito. But they do not represent the great majority of thinkers, doers, scholars, and philosophers in ethics, logic, biolinquistics, psycholinguistics, and many other disciplines today. Suffice to say that the study of law, itself, is on very shallow grounds from which to make grandiose statements such as Alito’s that justices do not need a Code of Ethics to guide their behaviors. Facts clearly show otherwise.