Do you believe it is dangerous to liberty? I do for 2 reasons:
It gives government power from top to down. That is, it’s supercentralization, and government hurts least when States rights supercede national powers, compared to having the largest jurisdiction giving power to the smallest one (the individual).
2nd, it’s basically a true Bill of Rights, where the Federal Government can give us our rights if it wants to via the Supreme Court and Congress. It truly made what’s called the Bill of Rights in to a Bill of Rights rather than the Bill of Prohibitions that it was intended to be.
I think we would’ve been better off without it. I also agree with DiLorenzo that it never was intended to protect blacks, given the track record of the Union as well as that of the Neo-Republican Party’s short history up until that point
First, I think we were better of with the Articles of confederation. The first 1 through 11 amendments were fairly good prohibitions on the federal govmt. To your first point, Many of the subsequent amendments were designed to build federal superiority over the states. The 14th is certainly one of these and your stated reasons are acurate. To your 2nd point, the bill of rights was desinged as a bill of negative rights specific to the federal govmt. The states were to be left to themselves. The idea of federalism was, as Dilorenzo said, to promote competition for good govmt. All this has been turned upside down. Most people are just frogs in the water. That the way govmt likes it. A quote from Thomson Mason regarding the navigation act.
The very objection evinces the folly of trusting the decision of this dispute to posterity, who, familiarized to oppression, will never resist it, and who, by long use, will be accustomed to look upon every badge of slavery with as little horror as we do upon the Navigaion Acts, which ought certainly to be considered as impositions of the strong upon the weak, and as such ought to be resisted as much as any of the other Acts we complain of ; nor will the dispute ever be ended till, by refusing submission to them, we remove so dangerous a precedent.