Wrong again. Do any of you others on your side wish to associate yourselves with this idiocy?
Gosh, I was wrong.
Now it's your turn to admit your own idiocy.
Wrong again. Do any of you others on your side wish to associate yourselves with this idiocy?
Post #209 ought to clear this up. The schoolroom take on this question is that the Bill of Rights was promised to obtain anti-federalist signatures on the Constitution, and without that promise, the Constitution would have failed to obtain enough signatures to legitimize it in the minds of the general population.
The sources I quoted earlier are not so sure of this. It seems likely that the Constitution would have squeeked by without a Bill of Rights and some influential federalists argued for delaying it until Congress could get properly down to business, if not indefinitely, but Madison, who was not a huge fan of it, interestingly enough, seems to have felt it a point of honor to keep the promise that bought the anti-federalist signatures. And he pushed congress into drafting it immediately, and took the lead its formulation.
Some of the amendments were offered up by the Mason and the committee of um...detail? toward the end of the constitutional convention, however, the Bill of Rights was drafted in Congress, as a single document.
Since the BofR was a horsetrade for the Constitution, and since both documents were plowing new legal waters, I would argue that, although they are separately drafted documents, their ties are so intimate as to easily forgive someone 3 centuries later for suffering the impression that they are one document. They are certainly the result of one coherent political argument to obtain a signed Constitution viewed as legitimizing the new government.