High-Profile Gun Rights Case Inches Toward Supreme Court

cbsnews.com ^ | August 25, 2009 | Declan McCullagh

[William Tell]

Mojave said: "What Supreme Court decision states that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states?"

From Cantwell:
"The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws. "

The Court is saying that the Bill of Rights is the repository of the federal protections of various privileges, immunities, and protections of life, liberty, and property. And as such, "the Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws". In other words, the prior incompetencies mandated by the Bill of Rights have now become mandates against the same laws passed by the legislatures.

If that is not the case, then please explain why the Court bothered to mention the First Amendment in Cantwell.

As for the "purpose" of the Fourteenth Amendment, that is revealed by its mandates. It's purpose is to permit judicial review of state laws. There is no other way that "No State shall make or enforce any law" can be accomplished than by the federal courts exercising their review and to the extent that the Bill of Rights includes privileges, immunities, or protections of life, liberty or property, such will be enforced against the states.

If that was not the intentions of those who authored the amendment, then what was the intention? Are you suggesting the judicial review was not intended? Are you suggesting that no consideration of the various protections in the Bill of Rights was intended?

You tell me, then, what is the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[Mojave]

"The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws. "

That is a reference to speech laws, not the Bill of Rights. The decision invented a new and type of "right" that consisted of a court created "fundamental concept of liberty" classification unstated in the Constitution. The court then proceeded to make a distinction between the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Right based on its new extra-Constitutional standard. The court offered no Constitutional justifications for it action, relying instead on policy assertions of its own creation to justify its activism.

For example:

But the people of this nation have ordained in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.

Even after establishing that system of rating and classifying different types of rights based on the courts own nebulous "long view" of what is or isn't "essential", the court still avoided making the false and unsupportable assertion that the 14th Amendment was written for the purpose of incorporating even the 1st Amendment against the states.

So let's try again:

What Supreme Court decision states that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states?