Without Constitutional Amendments, Our Rights are Not Secure
Our Constitution stops short of guaranteeing fundamental rights that we have long recognized through laws. It's time ensure these rights through Constitutional amendments.
In 1776, the American Colonies declared their independence from England with a revolutionary series of moral truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
After the Founding Fathers abandoned the unworkable Articles of Confederation, they created the framework for their new government, the Constitution. Then they secured many fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. These rights included freedom of speech and religion, due process, and more.
The moral principles embodied in these documents have echoed throughout the last 250 years in our laws, our treaties, our state constitutions, and in the constitutions of other nations. But Americans have known for centuries that our Constitution includes some foundational rights, but does not protect or even recognize them all.
American women have fought for their rights since before Abigail Adams famously exhorted her husband to “Remember the Ladies,” to keep men from holding legal tyranny over the women in their lives. The American struggle for equal rights for all, regardless of color, creed, or ethnicity, goes back at least as far as the 1688 Germantown Petition. Our demands for labor rights began before the Revolution, when Americans first went on strike in 1768. Our dedication to education began even earlier, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony began requiring free public education in 1647. We started our path to disability rights by expanding education to deaf and blind students in the early 1800s.
None of these rights are covered by the Constitution, but they broadly fall into President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech. Here FDR enumerated our democratic values: freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear.
Recognition of these rights shows in our history, in our laws, in our state constitutions, and especially in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt took a leading role in the international group creating the Declaration. It includes many rights covered by our Constitution, like life, liberty, equality before the law, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom from slavery, and freedom from torture.
But then it goes on, covering many rights we recognize but have not Constitutionalized. Those include the right to work, to an education, to healthcare, to equal pay for equal work, to unionize, to marry and to leave a marriage, to leisure.
Because America has never recognized these rights through Constitutional amendments, they have been inconsistently applied across our country and are all too reversible. Our fundamental rights should never depend on our location. Our fundamental rights should never be reversible.
In these days, when even our Constitutional rights to free speech and due process need our vigorous defense, it is long past time for us to catch up to the times and secure our other rights with a new Bill of Human Rights.
Consider what would be included in a constitution written in 2026 instead of 1776. Our conviction that all people are by their nature free and equal has needed more defense than our freedom from quartering soldiers. And we would recognize that few Americans can secure a livelihood or act as educated voters without an appropriate education. We would protect each other from the uniquely American fear of being crushed by healthcare costs. We would secure the right to safe and healthful food, water, shelter, and environment for ourselves and our descendents. We would ensure that all of us have the right to full participation in and access to public life.
So let’s do that.
For too long, we’ve relied on temporary fixes. It’s past time to establish these and other fundamental rights as the fundamental law of the land.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Press-Citizen on April 11, 2026.
Fundamental rights, as inshrined in our Constitution, should be limited to what are considered “negative“ rights. Negative rights are those things that you are free to do but do not place a burden or cost on another person. The first amendment inshrines certain negative rights. You are free to speak, but no one is required to listen. You are free to write whatever you want, but no one is forced to read what you write. You can practice whatever religion you want, but you can’t force others to do the same. Negative rights are consistent with the libertarian philosophy that people should be free to act in almost every way, that is peaceful, as long as they do not initiate force against others.
Positive rights, such as many of those that you suggest in this essay, use the force of government to create burden and costs on others. As a civil society, we may agree to provide some of the benefits that you have described, but they should not be considered rights or added to our Constitution.