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To: EternalVigilance

The first ten amendments, as confirmed by the direct language and the language of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, are pointed strictly at the feds, not the states, the counterfeit “incorporation doctrine” notwithstanding.


58 posted on 02/17/2017 4:37:41 PM PST by Jim W N
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To: Jim 0216; EternalVigilance; colorado tanker

You are correct about the 5th Amendment. Under Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore, the 5th Amendment was only a restriction against the Federal government and not the states. So I did a quick and dirty review of some of the state constitutions of the Confederate states to see what individual rights they protected.

South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee recognized rights of life, liberty and property (sometimes mingled with the rights of Article 39 of the Magna Carta), but only as applied to “Freedmen.”

Georgia did not have a provision similar to the 5th Amendment, but did restrict the right to plead cases to “freedmen.”

Virginia’s constitution of 1830 recognized very few rights but made no mention of “freedmen.” It did limit suffrage to white males.

Alabama and Mississippi recognized rights of life, liberty and property but did not restrict them to freedmen.

Georgia and Mississippi prohibited the legislature from passing any statute abolishing slavery or freeing slaves without the consent of their owners, but none of the other states specifically mentioned slavery or protected it, except as to their mentions of “freedmen.”

So for the slave owning states that would later secede, there was really no consensus as to the status of slavery from the standpoint of enshrinement in state constitutions.

As for the incorporation of rights in the Bill of Rights against the states, we may have to have that discussion another day.


59 posted on 02/17/2017 7:19:28 PM PST by henkster
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To: Jim 0216

Such a view actually violates the whole purpose of the Ninth Amendment.

Our rights are not to be violated, whether those rights are enumerated or not.

And again, the individual rights to life, liberty, and property are enumerated.

No government, at any level, has any legitimacy when it violates those rights. Period.


72 posted on 02/18/2017 11:53:27 AM PST by EternalVigilance
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