It would be ironic indeed to suddenly care about states rights as far as the Bill of Rights goes.  :)

I personally don't think the bill of rights was ever meant to not apply across the board.  If we took the right to arms as an example, it would be a little weird to think that the framers wanted to keep the Feds from restricting arms but had no problem if every state restricted them.

But I concede that such straight forward reasoning doesn't really apply any more.  Practically speaking, the Constitution means what SCOTUS says it means.  And thus, it is meaningless. 

I don't recall the particulars of your argument (and haven't attempted to refresh my memory ).  I seem to recall taking an idealistic line the Bill of Rights ought to apply to the states but not in the pattern that has been adopted.

So, for example in regards to the 1st amd, where it reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting religion..." I argued that a plain reading of this indicates that it refers to the Federal congress, and that if we wanted to incorporate this so as to apply to the States, then there should at least be an attempt to do so as an analog:  the state equivalent to 'Congress' should be what is affected.  Hence, state legislators would be prohibited from making laws respecting religion.

But this was the idealistic route which I believed had the advantage of being reasonable and coherent.  :)  It was never my intent to communicate that I expected our legislators, judges, and the like to be reasonable and coherent.  So, the first amd was incorporated to apply for to the states and instead of having some clear notion of precisely what that would look like, instead we have a mishmash of feelings about how it does apply.  It has come to be interpreted so that no person can, while in the capacity of a 'public' position, do anything that may conceivably (no matter how implausibly) be construed as 'respecting religion' (where 'religion' exclusively means Christianity).  This is, without question, outside of what the founders intended and leads to a lot of nonsense besides.

Better would have been to revisit the matter and pass another amendment which is clear and reasonable and determined through public discourse with eventual legislative ratification.  But that is the idealism talking.

I believe the current method of doing business is a mere shell of what it means to respect the 'rule of law.'

However, the second amendment is of a different nature.  The first amendment clearly and explicitly singles out the Federal legislative branch, and so a plain reading of it would keep it there.  The second amendment does not have such language at all, and to me a plain reading of it would suggest that this amendment at least would be immutable across the country, wherever the constitution is in force. 

So, you said in a post above,  "The right to bear arms is a cherished principle among conservatives but so is states' rights.  The two appear to be on a collision course."

But I don't agree at all, because while the 2nd amd has generally been construed (as in this latest opinion) as allowing that states can still regulate guns, the language doesn't really support that.  The 10th amd rams home the fact that powers not specifically given to the Federal government are reserved to the states- but even the states cannot take away those powers specifically given to the People by the constitution, which is clearly the case given in the 2nd amd:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In short, a plain reading of the second amendment makes it plain that under the Constitution that here is a right ascribed to the people that no government has the right to infringe, whether it be Federal, state, or local.   

The first amd:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,"

3rd amd:

"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house"

Etc, etc, until the 10th:
 
"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."

These little words are all important, and I believe they were chosen extremely carefully by the framers, and that the current method has been to dispense with the words in some vain attempt to think we can get at the principle in play without them.  And I think that is very bad policy.

But I did not, I thought, argue that this isn't the policy that would be extended.  If I did, I misspoke, or perhaps I hadn't formulated my thoughts yet sufficiently. 

I suppose that I should just be happy that some measure of the rights given to me- as a member of 'The people' by the Constitution has now been graciously bestowed upon me, all Praise to the Men in Black Cloaks.  But what they giveth, another court can taketh, since notions that we should be constricted to the actual words on the page have been dispensed with.

(And, if we felt that the 1st amd's controlling principle was valid, but unfortunately didn't explicitly apply to the states, my idealistic solution is to make another amendment which does, and not bastardize the one we've got until its virtually unrecognizable.)

The 2nd Amendment has a clause that could be argued as making it susceptible for special treatment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State . . . ."  My response would be though, that the substantive guarantees in both the First and Second Amendments were intended to be applied to the States via the 14th.  Justices Alito and Thomas delve heavily into that, going quite beyond what we were able to find when we were debating the issue in relation to the 1st Amendment.

I understand that you are arguing ideally.  From your perspective (assuming I understood it correctly), the word "Congress" in the First Amendment means it applies only to Congress, and the other amendments being silent on the actor, would logically apply to both the Federal Government and the States.

You wouldn't be alone in thinking that the Bill of Rights could apply to the States before the 14th.  Some state courts articulated that view in the early days of the Republic, though I think they were in the minority.  There is some good reason to think the Bill of Rights was not intended, initially, to apply to the States.  Madison didn't even think the Constitution needed a Bill of Rights, and all the States had most or all of the rights articulated now in the first eight amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  The Bill of Rights was a concession to the anti-federalists, who viewed the new national government with suspicion. 

It took the civil war for the States to fall under similar suspicion.  It was then that people decided that the States needed to be governed by the Bill of Rights.  And the SC had already decided by that time that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States, so the 14th was seen as overturning that decision.  Thomas especially talks about the key issue being the intent of the voters who ratified the 14th amendment, which would be based on what the public perceived the 14th Amendment accomplished.  This is where some of the extra stuff cited by Alito and Thomas about what people were saying about the 14th and how people during that time period would have construed the phrase privileges and immunities comes into play.

The opinions talk about the suppression of dissent and the harassment of former slaves as illustrative of what the 14th amendment was aimed at.  That would suggest both First and Second Amendment implications.

Also, to the extent you want to argue that an expansion to the States should be like its application to the federal government - i.e. legislative, there may be some merit to that idea, but it is good to keep in mind that the States do not have to be organized the same way as the federal government, and in fact often aren't.  "Legislative" power can be distributed across a much broader array of actors, especially since the States have powers unless proscribed, while the federal government has only delegated powers.

You are also right about the early belief that the BoR applied to the states.  I was thinking of the exact example you gave, of Madison, who contended that the rights defended in the BoR are already protected via the Constitution.  I think that this really goes to prove my overall point.

Clarification: Madison believed that there was no need for a BoR in the U.S. Constitution because: (1) the States already protected those substantive guarantees in state constitutions, and (2) Unlike state governments, which have general authority absent constitutional restrictions, the national government had only the powers specified in the U.S Constitution.  Madison believed that the national government having only specified powers would serve as an inherent check on the power of the national government.  Madison obviously was not prescient on this point.

Early SC cases dispensed with that understanding, which I find to be really odd.

I don't think the SC dispensed with the early understanding -- I think it was consistent with the early understanding -- that the BoR was designed as a check on federal power, not state power.  It was inconsistent with a literalist reading of at least some of the amendments given by some state courts that would have applied those amendments within their states (occasionally, a state would lack one of the BoR guarantees -- even then there was a common law fallback position some of these courts would articulate in case they were wrong about the particular BoR guarantee applying to the states).

However, having said that, it amazes me that yet again the SC proceeded to interpret the 14th amd completely differently and only after a while did it occur to them to begin the incorporation process.  It makes me wonder, despite the analysis provided by (Thomas, if I recall correctly) that the P&I clause was so self-evidently understood.  If this is the case, how could it have taken so long?  And why the need for selective incorporation?

(1) They goofed.  Alito's opinion points out that scholarly commentary from all points on the political spectrum seems to agree on that. (2) Political bias -- they didn't want the BoR to apply to the states, so they gutted the 14th (I am speculating a little here, I seem to recall something like this but haven't done rigorous research on that point).  Later incarnations of the court would think differently.  (3) Power grab.  When they did start incorporating, they wanted control over what to incorporate.  That way they could say some things weren't incorporated if they didn't think they should be. This was actually fairly explicit in one of the SC's opinions that I read when researching/debating this with you.  It also paved the way (though much later) for incorporating stuff that wasn't even in the BoR, or any other part of the U.S. Constitution.

I would like to read more about the dissent.  I really enjoyed Scalia's arguments.  :)  If I didn't know better, Scalia is a forum flamer.  :)

Oh yeah.  He's a major flamer.