 Article 7 through 10 round out the Bill of Rights, a single amendment effort that was all but required by the founders of the nation to gain sufficient public and colonial support to initiate the new central government. As noted earlier, these did not add to either the nature or the purpose of the original agreement, as said in the preamble. They rather documented citizen rights in a way that would challenge those who only read the articles as if they were standalone authorization for government activities. The amendments being addressed in this lesson are considerably simpler than the first six. The Seventh Amendment preserves the right to a jury in civil actions above a threshold. It recognizes the right to have other sovereign citizens weigh in on disagreements, but also allows those who to be heard by a judge for matters that are not of significant consequence as to the size of the dispute. The involvement of the jury is definitive. It is a witness to this sovereign citizen not being a subject of government authority except by choice. It is one more demand for the consent of the governed as a matter of law. A second provision in this amendment is of great consequence, though it has largely been ignored. It is that a jury finding a fact is definitive for all courts. When jury deliberation has established a fact in issue, the federal courts cannot challenge it. Consider the effect this should have had on the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which had previously been granted the right to appellate determinations of both fact and law. Of course, a judge you challenge the findings of a jury, well, it's rare. It happens for the protection of justice, where a jury finding is so out of bounds as to work injustice. It happens where taking action based on the jury finding would cause the court to defeat justice. In a close reading of this amendment, we also have to return to the purpose for the Constitution to ordain and establish a government. It is not an instrument to set citizen rights, but to require government recognition of citizen rights and to limit or forbid any government actions that might interfere with those rights. There has been serious question as to whether this right to a civil trial should apply to the states. It is a question raised by ignoring the sovereignty of the citizen that somehow the citizen of the state can have different rights than the citizen of the United States. It arises from assuming that a civil trial is not really a right, but a privilege granted by sovereign governments. The question arises from misreading what is written, from somehow missing the fact that it is written into the Constitution instead of arising from a limit on the national sovereignty of governments over its citizens. The effect of the Eighth Amendment has been to insist on uniform and reasonable application of law. In the negative, it also insists that the application of law will not be a separate punishment, but is to serve a valid public purpose. In the sense of a constituting agreement of we the people, this does not fix any citizen rights, but addresses limits on what central government is able to do. It immediately addresses criminal legislation forbidding barbaric consequences to be attached to federal laws. It immediately addresses judicial applications demanding a uniformity and reasonableness in the application of law to citizens. The effect on executive branch actions is less immediate, but much greater. What punishment might not be cruel and unusual for citizens who refuse to be regulated by government, the government that they own? Consider an environmental regulation that requires citizens who want to sell food to the public across state lines to purchase a federal license. If the citizen was already selling food within the state, there is no additional risk to the public. So what is the basis for assessing a fine or forfeiture upon a citizen for not procuring an interstate license? This amendment has worked to some effect in addressing punishments that are thought by some people to be cruel, as in the death penalty. Is life imprisonment less cruel? We have to address the concept of punishment, and it is to attach a negative consequence to some act or behavior. It is by its very nature intended to be sufficient to discourage the act or behavior, and it is necessarily cruel and hopefully not so common as to be unusual. The idea that punishment can avoid unpleasantness is a little bizarre. We have had to increase uniformity and punishment under this amendment, but it is somewhat repetitious of the equal protection of law provision already addressed. We are unlikely to ever have a general consensus among we the people, as to what is or is not so cruel as to be denied to government. There is no agreement among we the people. It is hard to find any basis for government taking sides with some citizens against others. The Ninth Amendment is a weak restatement of the general principle of citizen sovereignty. It tells those who govern that the people are the ones with rights, and that those who govern are forbidden to disparage or assault those rights. Government is to do what it was designed to do, providing self-government services to sovereign citizens. Those who have ignored the fact that their constituting authority was an agreement among the people have also been willing to ignore this amendment. It has not proven to be effective. The courts have not actively supported it. The Tenth Amendment is potent in terms of stating directly that the government only has delegated powers. It states that those not delegated belong to the states or to the people. This denies any potency in central government actions to even reduce the power of citizens. Again, those who ignore the fact that their constituting authority was an agreement among the people have also been willing to ignore this amendment. Congress has passed laws designed to disrupt citizen rights. The Supreme Court has determined that government efforts are authorized for just this purpose, and the Executive Branch has consistently acted to regulate and limit these rights for the good of the public. This amendment has accomplished little beyond restating what was already an inherent part of the originating constitution. Almost every unauthorized action taken by leaders in violation of this amendment has been given effect. The questionable authority of federal government to regulate the operation of laws by the states has hardly slowed this down. Violation is seen in the outright seizure of land, denying the common use of that land to the sovereign citizens of the state, claiming some alternative purpose served on behalf of the citizens of the United States. The fact that this seizure is made with the collusion of the state leadership simply spreads the corruption. The need for and wisdom of these first ten amendments is seriously in question. It is not a matter of their appropriateness, but of the consistent and significant willingness of public office holders to set aside the constitution when it might constrain their public efforts. Where the office holder sets personal purpose above legal constraint, it doesn't seem to matter what is written or how or where it is written in the constitution. For whatever leaders currently feel is a good cause, they are willing to overstep written legal boundaries. So why not overstep them? There is no consequence for doing so, and a good chance of success in getting other leaders to agree that it is right to ignore constitutional restrictions. This reality is that appending these amendments was an attempt to handle a threat to the nation. The reality is also that this attempt has largely failed. The threat has become our reality over a long period of time, and the fear damages to the nation have occurred regularly and consistently. We now have wisdom that was not available to these founders, and it comes from scientific studies in the early middle of the decades of the 20th century. We have had behavior studies to punishment and reward. It was documented that punishment does not extinguish an established behavior. It simply does not work. It rather gives rise to new behaviors that are initiated to avoid the punishment. The unwanted behavior continues, and the offenders take action to avoid having to face the consequences of their actions. Simply forbidding government's officers to exercise and to use granted powers for some purposes did not cause them to change what government leaders have done before. They consistently find other ways to justify what they do in accomplishing forbidden efforts, and they largely support each other in such pursuits. And the behavior of corporate sovereignty is the exercise of authority without any external constraint. Attempting to ban behaviors by sovereign leaders does not yield results even when they would accept only benevolent purposes. What we have is government officers establishing rules to protect their abuses, and they support each other in this. Some are rules that would protect a judge from accountability to citizens for even the most egregious damages incurred under a warrant that a judge issued. It is rules that would allow government to seize citizen earnings for a purpose that only Congress thinks to be public. It would include Supreme Court justices rewriting the Constitution from the bench when it does not agree with what benevolent leaders believe is right. Perhaps the most egregious and aggravated abuse has been achieved by the unauthorized titling of the Constitution as if it was a royal grant of sovereign authority with limits. This is in support of misreading what was written when it would prevent what leaders feel justified in doing. In the same period as the studies of punishment, we have studies in the technical side of management. We have a study of how we gain performance through groups of people who are working to accomplish that performance. Again, this provided knowledge that was not available to the founders. They constructed our government with the best knowledge available to them at the time and initiated the Great American experiment as they were able. As a performance engineer, I have long been a technical expert in this arena with my usual product being support for performance managers. There are specific requirements for managing performance and the failure to fulfill these requirements results in a failure of group performance. As a general rule, unmanaged efforts do not get performed by groups of people. It is an essential and cannot be replaced by something else. The first need is that there must be something for the manager to accomplish through the efforts that are managed. The second is authority to direct performance to the efforts they must take. The third is exception support for the performance efforts of those who do the work, stepping in with aid when they hit unplanned situations or problems that they cannot handle personally. In application to governance, we the ones who have something to accomplish but have not assumed effective authority over the public officers who are tasked with performance. Those who are charged with performance have assumed authority over the people and take whatever they feel they need to do whatever they accept as valid public purpose. Instead of accepting our support when the needs arise, they have simply taken what they feel is right so they can act on our behalf. Our original design of government does not include effective performance management and the people who should be performing are trying to manage each other. This makes for an ineffective government and one that incurs great expense while not performing much of anything. If there is a lesson here for government, it is that our government is unmanaged, that it has leaders demanding of the people instead of people supporting what leaders are to do in fulfilling their public purpose.