Forrest McDonald has famously argued that the Federalists were right about that. By his reading, the Bill of Rights has been a mechanism for further self-aggrandizement by the Federal Government.
My own feeling is that anyone who could turn a ban on the Federal Government’s having anything to do with church-state relations into a federal veto of state laws having to do with church-state relations would have found some other way to do that in the absence of the Bill of Rights.
