It may be said, indeed it has been said, that a bill of rights is not necessary, because the establishment of this Government has not repealed those declarations of rights which are added to the several State constitutions; that those rights of the people, which had been established by the most solemn act, could not be annihilated by a subsequent act of that people, who meant, and declared at the head of the instrument, that they ordained and established a new system, for the express purpose of securing to themselves and posterity the liberties they had gained by an arduous conflict.
I admit the force of this observation, but I do not look upon it to be conclusive. In the first place, it is too uncertain ground to leave this provision upon, if a provision is at all necessary to secure rights so important as many of those I have mentioned are conceived to be, by the public in general, as well as those in particular who opposed the adoption of this constitution. Besides, some States have no bills of rights, there are others provided with very defective ones, and there are others whose bills of rights are not only defective, but absolutely improper; instead of securing some in the full extent which republican principles would require, they limit them too much to agree with the common ideas of liberty.
—From the speech of James Madison of June 8, 1789, to the House of Representatives, introducing the amendments to the Constitution, which would become the Bill of Rights
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The bill of rights enumerates some of our most important fundamental natural rights. It doesn’t grant any rights. It enumerates them and explicitly forbids the government from infringing on them. This is an important distinction that is clearly expressed with the ninth amendment.
The extraordinary thing about the Bill of Rights it gave no rights at all, because humans in all stages of life have unalienable rights and the founders who drafted the U.S. Constitution shared in this philosophy. The “Bill of Rights” is a list of ten instructions to the institution of the federal government to embrace and protect the individual’s “unalienable Rights” from the crimes of others and from the crimes of government; no more, no less. The State governments’ did all the rest (the 10th Amendment) compete with each other for the best and brightest.