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personal rights which the individual holds free from
governmental action, not class rights, but personal
rights. Not personal rights as against another person, but
personal rights as against the government.
Secondly, our rule is this: that those rights
should be enforceable rights and not merely statements of
abstract principles, or exhortatory statements, and
third, and this is what I am getting to here, they
should be plainly and briefly written.
Now, our committee spent more time on this
due process clause than anything we had before the
committee. We tried to adopt, or tried to find out what
the draft article meant when it said, "discriminated by
law or other governmental action."
No one could tell us how it got in there, no
one could tell us -- we had Constitution lawyers -- no
one could tell us what governmental action meant, and the
same thing applies here, when they say "discrimination
by the statp".
I don't want to prolong the argument here. We
have said in concise language here everything that the