Selective Incorporation

Selective Incorporation:
The Continuation of a Negative Rights Constitution

When the fourteenth amendment was past in 1868, it was to protect recently freed slaves. Some interpret its protection from the states stripping them of their rights in the states that is granted in the Federal Constitution. If this where so, then the states would effectively seize to exist there individual laws would then have to comply with the rights granted to them by the federal government. The fourteenth amendment is not the end all be all of the Federal Constitution. Its adoption was not to remove one of the bases of the Federalist system. The states must be able to act on there own. Not purely autonomous, but with the ability to function with the freedom to set there own laws.
The Federal Constitution is a list of things the federal government can do, and that they can only do those things in their jurisdiction, the rest was left to the states. In the Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth Amendment grant the states, and more importantly, the People rights and protections. The fourteenth amendment, though valuable in helping protect the rights of new freed slaves, is not an encasement of the first eight amendments.
The United States Constitution was drafted by people who defined rights as negative rights. Thus, when the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment protects the "life, liberty, or property" and "equal protection of the laws" to "any person," it is referring to acts which government must refrain from doing, not to any positive duty of the government to act. The federal government is not required, and is expressively prohibited from, by the Tenth Amendment, from interfering with state laws unless they are in direct conflict with the laws passed by the federal government, in witch case the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the Federal Constitution would protect the denizens of any state that would attempt to violate any law.
Even though the Fourteenth Amendment dose state that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States.” This particular statement does not render the states obsolete. This is meant to ensure that any state does not violate the fundamental rights granted by the Federal Constitution, not that they adhere to a document that does not apply to their jurisdiction. It is preferable that the several states have a Bill of Rights similar to the Federal Constitution, or even have share all the amendments that protect the citizens of their particular states, but this is not required.
In the final two amendments of the Bill of Rights, both the people and the several states are protected. The Framer’s of the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights understood that as time would continue, holes in the original Federal Constitution would become apparent. Regardless that the Federal Constitution is a negative rights document, the government could distort things to violate rights that are not expressively stated. This is why the placed both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in the Bill of Rights. The Ninth Amendment, which would later be found, in women’s privacy rights cases, to be the source of other none-enumerated rights, explicitly states that the Federal Constitution is not created to grant one right in the expense of another. When you tie that with the Tenth Amendment that grants a power not specifically given to the federal government to the states, a powerful Constitutional logic is crated to protect the several states in their autonomy.
Again, the Fourteenth Amendment does not change the basis of the Federalist system of government. The several states are granted considerable freedoms and protections, as long as they do not violate enumerated rights that are in the Federal Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, although does grant