President Biden says the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment contains ‘right to privacy’

Biden has offered a brief overview of his constitutional views in the context of an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Biden, a senator from Delaware, said that for the past two weeks, during the debate over immigration reform, he and other Democrats have been talking about certain aspects of the Constitution that are not often discussed: “I’m not going to get into specific constitutional issues or constitutional amendments.” He acknowledged a need to explain more in detail and noted that it is “just a new way to bring up certain issues that I think a lot of people have a lot of questions about.”

Biden spoke about the relationship between the president and Congress, but he said the Constitution does not forbid the president to ignore Congress and to take matters into his own hands: “The idea that the Constitution would prohibit the president from following the advice of Congress [is] just ridiculous.”

When asked whether his administration would ever force an issue in the immigration debate that is not approved by Congress, Biden said, “We’ve already started to talk about these things. We’ll look at them and we’ll do what we think is right, which will be to enforce the laws of the United States.” The following exchange took place as Biden talked about the relationship between the president and Congress:

WALL STREET JOURNAL : Could you please give us your take on what it will take for the president to be able to do the things he needs to do?

BIDEN : Well, I mean, this has been, you know, one of the great challenges of this administration is, I think, the fact that we had the Congress for two years, in our first two years, when they were focused on the financial crisis, they were focused on the Bush tax cuts, they were focused on the war. They weren’t focused on immigration. They passed the financial reform and the war was winding down, the deficit was being reduced, the tax cuts were being reduced; we were going to the polls, the economy was going up, and the Democrats could put the Democrats — the Republicans could put the Republicans — were up, and we’ve got the Republicans up for the third time in a row, but we still had a Congress that was