<P> According to professor and former Circuit Judge Michael W. McConnell, "(T) he rights retained by the people are indeed individual natural rights, but those rights enjoy precisely the same status, and are protected in the same way, as before the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution . They are not relinquished, denied, or disparaged . Nor do natural rights become' ' constitutional rights .' ' They are simply what all retained rights were before the enactment of the Bill of Rights: a guide to equitable interpretation and a rationale for narrow construction of statutes that might be thought to infringe them, but not superior to explicit positive law . This understanding of the relation of unenumerated natural rights to positive law closely resembles the relation between common law and legislation: the common law governs in the absence of contrary legislation, and sometimes even guides or limits the interpretation of ambiguous or over broad statutes, but does not prevail in the teeth of specific statutory overrides . </P> <P> "This mode of interpretation offers a middle way between the two usual poles of unenumerated rights jurisprudence . One pole maintains that if a claimed right cannot be found in the Constitution, even applying a liberal construction to its terms, it is entitled to no protection at all...The other pole maintains that there are unwritten natural rights whose content must inevitably be determined, finally and without possibility of legislative override, by judges . These rights then receive full constitutional protection even when the representatives of the people have reached the contrary conclusion...If I am correct about the meaning of the Ninth Amendment, neither of these approaches is entirely correct . Rather, an assertion of natural right (generally founded on common law or other long - standing practice) will be judicially enforceable unless there is specific and explicit positive law to the contrary . This allows the representatives of the people, rather than members of the judiciary, to make the ultimate determination of when natural rights should yield to the peace, safety, and happiness of society". </P> <P> Still others, such as Thomas B. McAffee, have argued that the Ninth Amendment protects the unenumerated "residuum" of rights which the federal government was never empowered to violate . </P> <P> According to lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jesup Stimson, the framers of the Constitution and the Ninth Amendment intended that no rights that they already held would be lost through omission . Law professor Charles Lund Black took a similar position, though Stimson and Black respectively acknowledged that their views differed from the modern view, and differed from the prevalent view in academic writing . </P>

What powers that were reserved for congress are now in the hands of the president