Editing Openai/695c860c-fb24-8010-a014-a687d2d61cb3 (section)

=== Assistant: You’re right about one important thing — and it’s often misstated in modern treatments — the Bill of Rights was describ… ===
You’re right about one important thing — and it’s often misstated in modern treatments — the Bill of Rights was described as “declaratory and restrictive,” and many Federalists regarded it as redundant. That part is historically solid.

Where the inference breaks is what that redundancy was redundant ''of''.

Let’s separate the pieces carefully, because this is where people talk past each other.

==== Madison’s phrasing in the House was that the amendments were: ====

: 

But declaratory of what?
Not of some free-floating natural law obligation binding all sovereigns equally. Rather:
'' Declaratory of the limited nature of ''federal* power
* Restrictive of misconstruction of federal grants

The redundancy Federalists complained about was this:

: 

That redundancy argument only makes sense with respect to the federal government, whose powers were enumerated.

It makes no sense as an argument about the states, whose police powers were:
* General
* Plenary
* Reserved
* Already constrained (or not) by their own constitutions

If the Bill of Rights were understood to bind states:
* The “redundant” objection would have been raised by the states
* State ratifying conventions would have treated the amendments as substantive alterations of state sovereignty

They did not.

==== You’re also right that many Antifederalists understood the rights as pre-existing and natural. ====

But their concern was not:

: 

It was:

: 

This is why their repeated worry was:
* Necessary and Proper
* General Welfare
* Implied powers
* Consolidation

They feared federal encroachment, not state abuse.

That’s why Antifederalist demands overwhelmingly focused on:
* Congress
* Federal courts
* Standing armies
* Federal taxation
* Federal jurisdiction

Not state legislatures.

==== This is the hardest problem for your position. ====

If everyone believed the federal Bill of Rights already bound states:

===== Not just unnecessary — conceptually incoherent. =====

You don’t propose “no state shall” language to restate something already understood to be operative by default. That language exists precisely to override residual sovereignty.

===== The Constitution already used “No State shall…” only when it meant to carve out exceptions from state sovereignty. =====

Treating the Bill of Rights as silently doing the same thing contradicts the drafting pattern everywhere else in the document.

===== Not one early state supreme court treated the First–Eighth Amendments as binding on state law as such. =====

They invoked:
* State constitutions
* Common law
* Natural rights

But not the federal Bill of Rights as controlling law.

Practice matters here — especially when the claim is “universally understood.”

==== Your position becomes very strong once we cross 1868. ====

After the Fourteenth Amendment:
* Rights are no longer protected merely by negative federal enumeration
* The relationship between citizen and state is altered
* The Privileges or Immunities Clause is expressly declaratory of pre-existing rights

At that point:
* Selective incorporation is logically unstable
* Treating some rights as “fundamental” and others as optional is incoherent
* The Seventh Amendment distinction you raise is one of the few that actually survives scrutiny

On that terrain, your petition is doing real damage to modern doctrine.

==== - Yes: The Bill of Rights was understood as declaratory of pre-existing rights. ====
* Yes: Federalists thought it redundant because Congress lacked enumerated power to violate those rights.
* No: That redundancy was not understood to bind states absent explicit text.
* Yes: After 1868, treating incorporation as discretionary is indefensible.

If you want, the next productive step is to separate “natural right existence” from “jurisdictional binding”, because the Founders clearly did — and modern incorporation doctrine collapses precisely because it fails to keep those categories distinct.