Then you get perverse stuff being pushed on us, like what Ralph Nader thinks the rights of the people ought to be. And then it's free lunches for all, courtesy of the Ninth Amendment and us working stiffs ;)
The ninth amendment seems to be the least used and the least abused as well as the most used and most abused. While going through various searches, I came across the case of Griswold V.S. Conn.
This was about a statute prohibiting the use of contraceptives which was voided as an infringement of the privacy laws.
Justice Douglas's opinion said: "Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras (a body of rights held to the guaranteed by implication in civil Constitution). Formed by those guarantees that help give them "life and substance."
Justice Douglas returned to the body of the ninth in an attempt to support " the thought that these penumbra rights are protected by one amendment or a complex of amendments despite the absence of a specific reference."
Justice Goldberg in concurring devoted several pages to the ninth. While reading it, one sentence jumped out - " To hold that a right so basic and fundamental as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed, because that right is not guarantee in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the ninth amendment and give it no effect. Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution, because it is not listed in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the ninth amendment."
He goes on to say that the framers believed there are fundamental rights that exist and are "not expressly enumerated in the first eight and an intent that the list of rights included there not be deemed exhaustive."
In the same decision, Justice Black stated "privacy is a broad abstract and ambiguous concept."
To paraphrase Justice Black, the ninth amendment is a broad abstract and ambiguous concept. It can be used in conjunction with the other amendments to help define those gray areas. It can be used as a matter of conscience to form rulings on morals, ethnicity, citizenship, right to live or die as we see fit, hate privacy and etc. It is not so much infringed upon as it used to define infringement by the other eight amendments.
The rights covered by the ninth and also the tenth are rights that are to be protected, not granted by the government - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They cannot be taken away, but it seems that government has forgotten that with various infringements.
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So it looks like general re is correct - that activist judges could use the 9th to overrule state laws, something IMO the 9th was never meant to do.