This was one of the arguments the Antifederalists made against the Bill of Rights, that it would eventually be construed as "itemizing a list of freedoms citizens are allowed."
The flip side is that I find it hard to imagine history not eventually resulting in the transmutation of a limited central government into an all powerful one, following the strong tendency of republics turning into empires, as ours has in form. I think the Swiss have avoided this, but I don't follow them closely; I'm not aware of any other counterexamples.
On the other hand our political system is still a lot better than many others, including the Westminster parliamentary one we deliberately rejected unlike almost all others. We can look at the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a natural right acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, for a good historical example. It was judicially nullified or outright ignored for all the nation's history until 2008, and on the ground that's still essentially true outside of the Federal courts that cover Illinois. It was the political process that brought us back from the brink (and there's enough political power outside of Chicago and its closest suburbs that Illinois is also partly a example of the latter).
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This was one of the arguments the Antifederalists made against the Bill of Rights, that it would eventually be construed as "itemizing a list of freedoms citizens are allowed."
The flip side is that I find it hard to imagine history not eventually resulting in the transmutation of a limited central government into an all powerful one, following the strong tendency of republics turning into empires, as ours has in form. I think the Swiss have avoided this, but I don't follow them closely; I'm not aware of any other counterexamples.
On the other hand our political system is still a lot better than many others, including the Westminster parliamentary one we deliberately rejected unlike almost all others. We can look at the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a natural right acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, for a good historical example. It was judicially nullified or outright ignored for all the nation's history until 2008, and on the ground that's still essentially true outside of the Federal courts that cover Illinois. It was the political process that brought us back from the brink (and there's enough political power outside of Chicago and its closest suburbs that Illinois is also partly a example of the latter).