Originally Posted by
Little-Acorn
Nonsense. The Constitution is a product of compromise, experience, and a well-founded fear of the power of central government. It was written for the purpose of (a) creating a new form of government, and (b) limiting the powers of that government - things that had never been tried before. It was successful beyond any of the Framer's wildest expectations, until we started flagrantly disobeying it around the turn of the (20th) century.
It gave the Fed govt only certain, limited powers (those specifically named in it), and by doing so, implicitly forbade all other powers to the Fed govt. Some of the powers not mentioned, and thus forbidden, were the power to regulate speech, religion, weapons, etc. A lot of people thought that would be too easy to violate (history has since proven them right), and so demanded that some of the most important rights be also specifically mentioned and the govt banned from interfering with them. So the Bill of Rights came into being shortly after the Constitution was ratified.
The Constitution alone does NOT "only" support govt power. It gives the Fed gov certain powers, true, buth then it LIMITS the Fed to only those powers, leaving the rest to the states and lower govts to exercise as they chose. Except for those few powers specifically given to the Fed, of course. And it calls for a deliberately complex, cumbersome amendment process, assigning veto power to even a small minority of states, that must be fulfilled if any more power is to be legally taken from the states and given to the Fed govt.
That limitation was what made the Constitution the great, enduring document it is. The recent violation of that limitation by our current "progressive" liberals (in both parties) is what makes them the country-destroyers they are.
BTW, the Bill of Rights does not "secure the rights of the people". It only secures some of them - those the Framers considered the most important. It contains a statement pointing this out (9th amendment), saying that the rights it mentions, aren't necessarily the only right the people have.
Most of those declarations of rights, were unnecessary and superfluous, since the onstitution gave the Fed govt no powers to interfere with them in the first place. But many people at that time, knew that slick lawyers and power-grabbers would ignore the Const's implicit limitation, all too well. And so they tried to "cast in stone" the most important rights, to make them harder to unconstitutionally violate. How right they were to do so. Our "progressives" now have to flagrantly ignore written Constitutional mandates to violate those rights - something they do anyway, with increasing frequency in the last 70+ years.