Editing Openai/695c860c-fb24-8010-a014-a687d2d61cb3 (section)

===== - The U.S. Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights constrained only the federal government, not state governments. This was longstanding doctrine before the Fourteenth Amendment. Wikipedia<ref>{{cite web|title=Wikipedia|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights|publisher=en.wikipedia.org|access-date=2026-01-09}}</ref> =====
* For decades after the Civil War, the Supreme Court continued to hold that the Bill of Rights as originally written did not automatically apply to the states — e.g., United States v. Cruikshank (1876) reaffirmed that the First and Second Amendments did not apply against state actors. Congress.gov<ref>{{cite web|title=Congress.gov|url=https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11242|publisher=congress.gov|access-date=2026-01-09}}</ref>

So the idea that the Bill of Rights was always binding on the states is not supported by early Supreme Court precedent — a point that has stood uncontroversially in American constitutional history before the incorporation doctrine was formulated.