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Basic Governing Principles
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Contained in the Constitution's Preamble are its founding principles: To form a more perfect union, to provide for a common defense, to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty for present and future generations. For many, the guarantee of justice and liberty was crucial to their support of a national charter.
However, when first drafted and submitted to the states for ratification, the Constitution did not include any reference to individual rights. The Framers assumed that the powers of the newly formed national government were so carefully constrained that individual rights required no expressed protection. Moreover, the Federalists, who supported a strong federal government, argued that by enumerating a bill of rights, those rights deemed essential yet left unspecified would be vulnerable to government encroachment.
But the demand to secure a definitive roster of individual rights against government infringement and the uncertainty of politics persisted. Unless assured that a bill of rights would be passed, many states threatened to withhold ratification of the Constitution. Consequently, in 1789, the First Congress of the United States adopted the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. Ratification of these amendments by the required number of states occurred in 1791. And the Ninth Amendment, by expressly protecting fundamental rights not specifically described in the Constitution, lay to rest the Federalists' concern that the singling out of any right for protection jeopardized the protection of all other rights not similarly identified.
The Bill of Rights restricts government invasion of certain individual liberties, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. It also prohibits the "establishment" of any official religion. The values embodied in the Bill of Rights center on individual worth and dignity and refer to certain inalienable rights that inhere to us all as human beings, and citizens of a constitutional democracy.
Nearly two-thirds of the Bill of Rights is devoted to safeguarding the rights of persons suspected or accused of crime. These rights include due process of law, fair trial, and freedom from self-incrimination, cruel and unusual punishment and being held in jeopardy twice for the same crime.
The Bill of Rights, when first adopted, applied only to the actions of the federal government. An individual whose civil liberties had been violated by the state had to rely on that particular state's constitution or bill of rights for recourse. Restraining state incursions into civil liberties was the subject of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, ratified in 1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively, and intended to dismantle the institution of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted newly freed male slaves the right to vote, but the amendment that paved the way for a broad and comprehensive application of the Bill of Rights to the states was the Fourteenth Amendment. Over the past 100 years, many of the liberties articulated in the first ten amendments have been incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee to state citizens due process and equal protection under the law.
For the first 150 years following its adoption, the Bill of Rights was rarely invoked or the subject of judicial interpretation. But beginning in the 1920s, the Constitution's first ten amendments have played an increasingly active role in resolving difficult questions of public policy - from school prayer and mandatory drug testing laws, to birth control and capital punishment. And founding principles such as "justice" or "liberty" and constitutional precepts such as "due process" and "equal protection under the law" have been given new meaning by succeeding generations, reflecting changes in human sensibilities, values and ethos over the past two hundred years.
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