The Bill of Rights Was Given to the States for a Reason

We The People for President · November 2026

Most Americans are taught that the Bill of Rights is a list of personal freedoms. It is that. But it is also something more, and the “something more” has been nearly forgotten. The first ten amendments were the price the States demanded for joining the Union. They were written to divide and balance power, to keep the new national government inside the narrow lane it was given, and to protect the sovereignty of the States and the People who created it.

To understand why, we have to go back to the great argument of 1787–1788, when the men and women history calls the Anti-Federalists stood up against a Constitution they feared would swallow the States whole.

A Constitution Without a Bill of Rights

When the Philadelphia Convention finished its work in September 1787, the proposed Constitution contained no bill of rights at all. George Mason of Virginia, author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, refused to sign it for that reason. Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Luther Martin, Mercy Otis Warren, George Clinton and writers under names like Brutus, Centinel and the Federal Farmer took the case to the public. They were not against union. They were against consolidation: one central government absorbing the powers of the States.

What the States’ Advocates Argued

Consolidation. A national government with power to tax, raise armies, regulate commerce and make all laws “necessary and proper” would, step by step, reduce the States to administrative districts.
Elastic clauses. The Necessary and Proper Clause, the General Welfare language and the Supremacy Clause had no fixed limits. Brutus warned that whatever Congress judged necessary would become lawful, and state law would give way before it.
The federal judiciary. Brutus predicted that federal courts, answerable to no one and interpreting the Constitution by its “spirit,” would steadily enlarge federal power at the expense of the States.
Taxation. Direct federal taxing power, they argued, would compete with and eventually crowd out the States’ own revenue, the lifeblood of self-government.
Standing armies. A permanent national army under federal control, with power over the state militias, was seen as the classic instrument of tyranny.
Distance and representation. A House of only 65 members, legislating for a vast republic of some three million people, could not know or answer to the people the way local governments could.
No declaration of rights. Without written guarantees of conscience, press, assembly, jury trial and protection from general warrants, the People would be left to the goodwill of whoever held power.

The Federalist Reply

The Federalists answered with real arguments. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84 that a bill of rights was unnecessary, and even dangerous, because the national government had only the powers listed; listing exceptions might imply that everything not listed was allowed. James Madison assured readers in Federalist No. 45 that federal powers were “few and defined,” while those of the States were “numerous and indefinite.” A stronger union, they said, was needed for defense, trade and paying the Revolutionary War debts.

The States’ advocates replied with a simple question: if the powers truly are few and defined, what is the harm in writing that down?

The States Made It a Condition

That question carried the day. Massachusetts ratified in February 1788 only after proposing amendments, beginning with a declaration that all powers not expressly delegated were reserved to the States. Virginia, New York and New Hampshire followed the same path, sending long lists of proposed amendments with their ratifications. North Carolina refused to ratify at all until a bill of rights was in motion. Rhode Island held out longer still.

Madison, who had once called a bill of rights a “parchment barrier,” promised his Virginia voters he would carry amendments through the First Congress, and he kept his word. In September 1789 Congress sent twelve proposed amendments to the State legislatures. Ten were ratified by the States and took effect on December 15, 1791.

Congress itself recorded why. The official preamble to the Bill of Rights reads:

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added…”

Read that carefully. The Bill of Rights was not a gift from Washington to the People. It was a set of restrictive clauses demanded by the States and placed on the national government, to prevent “misconstruction or abuse of its powers.”

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments: The Seal on the Compact

The last two amendments state the whole design plainly. The Ninth says the listing of certain rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Tenth says:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

This was the answer to Brutus and the Federal Farmer. Power would be distributed, not concentrated. Washington would hold the powers delegated to it and nothing more. Everything else stayed home, with the States and with the People. In 1833, in Barron v. Baltimore, Chief Justice John Marshall confirmed that the Bill of Rights was written as a limit on the federal government.

The Long Game: How the Balance Was Lost

The founding design was not overturned in one stroke. No amendment ever repealed the Tenth. No Congress ever voted to make the States subordinate. The balance was worn down slowly, one law, one funding formula and one court ruling at a time, each step small enough to seem reasonable and each building on the last. Whether it was a deliberate design or a century of drift, the result is the same: the very consolidation Brutus warned about.

One Step at a Time

1913: the money and the voice. In one year the Sixteenth Amendment gave Washington a direct tax on incomes, the Seventeenth took the election of Senators away from the state legislatures, and the Federal Reserve Act centralized the nation’s money. The national government gained a vast, independent revenue stream at the very moment the States lost their seat at the table.
1930s–1940s: the elastic clause stretches. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court held that a farmer growing wheat on his own land, to feed his own animals, was engaged in “interstate commerce” Congress could regulate. If that counts, very little does not.
The spending power. Once Washington collected the taxes, it could send money back to the States with conditions attached. In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), the Court approved withholding highway funds from States that would not raise their drinking age. Policy Congress could not order directly, it could now buy.
The administrative state. Federal agencies, not elected legislatures, came to write most of the rules Americans live under, and the States became the agents who carry them out.

None of these steps, alone, announced the end of State sovereignty. Together, they reversed Madison’s promise. Today federal power is the one that looks “numerous and indefinite,” while the powers left to the States look “few and defined.”

The Fourteenth Amendment: Our Answer

Critics will say the Fourteenth Amendment changed everything, and that since courts now apply the Bill of Rights against the States, the founding balance no longer applies. We take that argument seriously, and we answer it directly. Our answer has four parts, and the Second Amendment runs through all of them.

1. We honor the Fourteenth Amendment’s purpose, and the right to bear arms was at its heart. After the Civil War, several Southern States passed “Black Codes” that kept freed men and women from owning firearms, assembling or testifying in court. Mississippi’s 1865 code made it a crime for freedmen to keep guns without a license. Congress answered with the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which expressly protected “the constitutional right to bear arms,” and with the Fourteenth Amendment. When Senator Jacob Howard introduced the Amendment in the Senate in May 1866, he said the privileges of citizens included the personal rights in the first eight amendments, and he named the right to keep and bear arms. The men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment knew what it meant for a people to be disarmed by their own government. So do we.

2. The Amendment’s own words were set aside. The Fourteenth Amendment says: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” That was the clause meant to secure those rights. In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Supreme Court read it almost out of existence. Three years later, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), arising from the Colfax Massacre of Black citizens in Louisiana, the Court held that the Second Amendment restrained only Congress and offered the victims no federal protection. The promise of 1866 was broken by the courts within a decade.

3. Judges rebuilt it on a different foundation, and took the power for themselves. Beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Court began applying parts of the Bill of Rights to the States through the Due Process Clause instead, choosing one right at a time which ones were “fundamental” enough to count. That was not done by the People or the States through Article V. It was done by judges, case by case, over most of the twentieth century. The result was a far larger shift than anyone voted for: the question of which rights Americans hold, and how far they reach, moved from the written text and the People to the judgment of nine appointed justices, who then became the final authority over countless questions of local life.

The Second Amendment Shows Both Sides of the Story

The right was protected late, and narrowly. The Supreme Court did not hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right until District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), and did not apply it to the States until McDonald v. Chicago (2010), 142 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Both cases were decided 5–4. A right that hangs on one vote of one court is not secure in the way the Founders intended.
Even the Court is divided on the route. In McDonald, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the result but wrote that the right belongs under the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the text its framers actually wrote, not under judge-made “due process.” In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen (2022), the Court said gun laws must be judged by the Constitution’s text and the nation’s historical tradition. That is our method too: text and history first.
Half of the Amendment was left behind. Heller treated the opening words, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” as a statement of purpose. The individual right survived; the institution the Amendment names was treated as history.
Meanwhile, the militia was nationalized step by step. The Militia Act of 1903 turned the organized militia into the National Guard. The National Defense Acts of 1916 and 1933 made the Guard a reserve of the U.S. Army. In Perpich v. Department of Defense (1990), the Court held that a governor could not stop his own State’s Guard from being sent abroad for training. Today federal law (32 U.S.C. § 109) lets a State keep its own defense forces only by federal permission.

4. So the Fourteenth Amendment is not the end of the argument. It is proof of our point. An amendment written to protect the People’s rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, was first emptied by the courts and then rebuilt in a way that concentrated power in Washington. Over the same century, the “well regulated Militia” the States were promised was absorbed into the federal military. A Bill of Rights given to the States to restrain Washington became a means for Washington to direct the States. That is exactly the kind of “misconstruction” its preamble was written to prevent.

Restoring Both Halves of the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment has two halves, and the founding design needs both. The first half names the institution: a well regulated Militia, necessary to the security of a free State. The second half secures the right of the People to keep and bear arms, so that institution can exist. Article I, Section 8 reserves to the States “the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia.” The Tenth Amendment reserves to them every power not delegated. Read as its framers wrote it, the Fourteenth Amendment forbids any State to take away the citizen’s right to be armed.

Put together, the answer is the statutory State Militia: armed citizens, whose right to keep arms is protected, enrolled under State law, serving under the Governor, led by officers the State appoints, trained to the discipline Congress prescribes and organized by county with the elected sheriff. It is the opposite of a private army or a vigilante group. Its authority comes from the statute that creates it, and it acts only on lawful orders. That accountability is what “well regulated” means.

This is how WTPP connects the two amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment, honestly read, protects every citizen’s right to bear arms. The Second and Tenth Amendments, honestly read, give each State its own well regulated Militia to secure a free State. Restoring both, beginning with a Texas Security Bill, is how the founding balance is rebuilt, by statute and in the open.

A Correction, Not a Revolution

What was changed gradually can be corrected deliberately, and in the open. That is the purpose of the WTPP argument and movement: to name the overreach plainly, to trace it step by step and to call for a lawful correction that restores the balance the States bargained for, while keeping every protection of individual liberty the People have won.

Our Position: Return to the Founding, Then Move Forward

We The People for President believes the founding debate between the Federalists and the States’ advocates was never truly settled. It was quietly worn down. We believe it is time to hash it out again, out loud and within the law, and that the place to start is where the Founders started: with the Constitution, the ratification record and the Bill of Rights the States demanded.

Our claim is not nostalgia. It is a call for a rebirth: to recover the founding vision of limited, delegated federal power and sovereign States, and then build forward from it, applying those principles to the questions of our own time. We intend to pursue that through peaceful and lawful means:

Education. Teaching the ratification debates, the Anti-Federalist papers and the original purpose of the Bill of Rights alongside the Federalist Papers.
State legislatures. Encouraging States to assert their reserved powers and to decline to act as administrators of federal programs, as the Supreme Court has recognized they may in cases such as New York v. United States (1992), Printz v. United States (1997) and Murphy v. NCAA (2018).
The courts. Supporting Tenth Amendment and enumerated-powers arguments grounded in the text and the historical record.
Article V. Exploring the constitutional path the Founders gave the States themselves to propose amendments, including restoring structural checks on federal power.
Public debate. Inviting Federalists and States’-rights advocates of today to make their best case in the open, as Publius and Brutus once did in the newspapers of New York.

The Bill of Rights was given to the States so that power would stay divided, balanced and close to the People. We intend to remind the country why, and to finish the conversation the Founders began.

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