More Daily Show Constitutional Jurisprudence

Obviously Jon was still a little thrown thrown off by David Barton's argument about the Bill of Rights not applying to the states. Last night he invited a constitutional law scholar to talk about how the states came to be held to the same standard as the federal government. His guest touched on some of the same points that I made in my response to their debate: that the Fourteenth amendment "revolutionized" the Constitution; that there's a long history of legal reasoning known as "incorporation" that currently guarantees us the same freedoms from the federal government as from state governments; that the Founding Fathers did debate how much of a role religion should play in public life, but ultimately decided to keep them separate. He also alludes to a larger point that both the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment enumerate a wide array of powers and responsibilities to the federal government - something that many conservatives still dispute today.