You say that the Cons prohibits the states from infringing on individual rights. This isn't quite true. The Cons pretty much leaves the states free to deal with civil liberties as they see fit. The prohibitions on the states are found in art 1 sec 10, and as you can see, those prohibitions are pretty thin. It's not that the framers didn't care or anything, it's just that the states were used to dealing with their own issues, and would have certainly had problems if the new G had come along and said, "Here now, we're the new boys in town and you will do this and this with your laws, and that's that."
Ray: --- You say that the Cons prohibits the states from infringing on individual rights. This isn't quite true.
The Cons pretty much leaves the states free to deal with civil liberties as they see fit.
You're ignoring Art. VI and the Amendments.
The prohibitions on the states are found in art 1 sec 10, and as you can see, those prohibitions are pretty thin.
Our Bill of Rights is 'thin'?
It's not that the framers didn't care or anything, it's just that the states were used to dealing with their own issues, and would have certainly had problems if the new G had come along and said, "Here now, we're the new boys in town and you will do this and this with your laws, and that's that."
Yep, there was a lot of fancy language used, & compromises made, -- in order ratify our Bill of Rights, -- but they're still pretty clear to me.
Do you have a problem with States obeying them as the Law of the Land?
Now that they were formally included, all of a sudden they became negotiable (those that were included), the federal government found a way to deny or alter some of the people's rights, giving the states the power to legislate some of those rights away. The second amendment comes to mind.
How convenient. State and federal governments working hand in hand to subvert the will of we the people. I don't think anyone will argue that the federal government will impose its will on the states (by virtue of contracts between the state and the fedguv), and at the same time, will withdraw its power and allow the state to frame its own laws against the rights of the people. Gun rights are not uniform, due to the doctrine of incorporation which allows states to write laws before the fedguv becomes involved.
But two things show both the state and the fedguv as inconsistent in practice. One is Roe v Wade, which is really a state problem, and the other is the second amendment, which the fedguv is supposed to enforce in favor of the people of all states. The 14th was supposed to be the teeth of the first Civil Rights act, but the fedguv deferred and allowed the states their Jim Crow practices. It wasn't until 100 years later that the fedguv created another Civil Rights Act and began enforcing them for the first time. (Thanks to Martin Luther King.)
It was as though the fedguv knew that it couldn't control how the states treated the blacks immediately after the civil, but it gave the states 100 years to get used to the idea that the 14th Amendment was going to be enforced, which it was upon the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Concerning indvidual rights, I'm with Forthedeclaration, and believe that unalienable rights are personal rights and neither the state nor the fedguv have been given power by the people to alter them. The federal government has enumerated powers, and they should have been more tightly defined on day one. States are also subject to the will of the people, and in that each state has a republican form of government, the rights of the very least Citizen can in no way be infringed upon by any kind of a majority vote.
In any case, Article VI para 2 (supreme law clause) is the logical formula to use in determining whose law is more supreme -- the people, the state or the federal government. I vote for the individual first, then the state, in matters not pertaining to the protection of unalienable rights, and then the federal government, in matters pertaining to the protection of unalienable rights which some states are prone to infringe upon. IMO.