Hi YHAOS! Of course it is. Whether there were twelve or ten amendments submitted to the states for ratification seems to me to be beside the point. The piece de resistance is that it was the Framers themselves who chose the "order of the book" that became the Bill of Rights. And there is a reason behind what they decided.
First you have the sovereign individual rights (First Amendment): Religious liberty, free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Next you have the Second Amendment, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which the Framers are telling us, by putting it immediately second, is the "teeth" the people have to ensure they can legitimately defend their rights as set forth in the First Amendment against the depredations of unjust power if all else fails. And so forth and so on, down the line, in an order that goes from closest to the People to what is further away from their immediate concerns.
The layout of the main body of the Constitution similarly reveals the Framers' intentions and priorities: Starting with the Preamble, the We the People, which are the true sovereigns of our constitutional order. Following next, Article I, dealing with Congress -- the branch of government closest to the people and their "agents." In Section 8, Congress receives its just powers from the People. In Article II, dealing with the Executive, the People spell out the powers of the Chief Executive (and chief law enforcement officer and commander in chief in wartime). The President is the president of the whole people, and a substantial part of his role in our system relates to international relations. Then on to Article III, and so forth. It mirrors the technique used in the order of priority of the BoR: an order that goes from closest to the People to what is further away from their immediate concerns.
Just the very layout of the document clearly indicates who in our system has what powers, and all refer back to the Preamble as the source of their authority.
The Framers apparently took great thought in crafting the order of the presentation of the Constitution, just as they did with the BoR. But to see this, you cannot read the Constitution as if it were merely an "instructional manual," to be read literally for its information content. If you truly want to grasp its meaning, you have to "read in between the lines." When you do that, you see this amazingly organic, and astonishingly self-consistent document that makes no bones about the fact that, for the Framers, it is We the People who are the final authority.
Anyhoot. The fans of a "living constitution" do not see it this way, I gather....
Thank you so much for writing, YHAOS!
Uh ... BB, I guess my earlier posts on this weren't clear. What is now the First Amendment was originally the third. That's the package that the authors of the Bill of Rights sent to Congress. That's what Congress passed and sent to the states. If the whole package had been ratified by the states, as originally drafted and passed by Congress, then what we now know as the First Amendment would be the Third Amendment. There was no grand design to make the (present) First be number one on the list. It was number three (on a list of twelve).
No state knew what the others would do. When the dust settled, the original first and second didn't get ratified. The original third amendment thus became what we now know as the First.
". . . it was the Framers themselves who chose the "order of the book" that became the Bill of Rights"
Take the ten articles and radomly re-order them. See if they present as logical and comprehensible an organic structure. Now put them back in their original order, and try to determine where you might most logically insert the other two articles so that they would fit in appropriately. This would be a futile excercise for anyone who regards our Bill of Rights as being "sort-a like Topsey, they just growed." Come to think of it, this would be an equally futile exercise for the rest of us, who grasp its significance absent the need to do an exercise.
In deed...
"If the Constitution is to be construed to mean what the majority at any given period in history wish the Constitution to mean, why a written Constitution?"--Frank J. Hogan, President, American Bar Assn. (1939)
Seemed to me that betty boop's assertions would be apparant by reading the Supreme Court's guidelines for making decisions when rights are in conflict. Unfortunately I'm too tired right now to pursue it any further. Maybe tomorrow though...