thegreekdog wrote:I'm fairly certain the founders didn't intend for that particular portion of the Constitution to apply to non-federal government units. Still doesn't matter because the law's the law.
They didn't. The Federal Constitution applied to the Federal Government only. A good example of this is the first amendment. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, several states had established state religions. These states were basically shamed into dropping them after they ratified the constitution, but only because of the example of the constitution, not because of the wording of the constitution.
The idea that the constitution in general applied to the states, is a badly derived view known as the incorporation doctrine.
The doctrine of incorporation has been traced back to either Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad v. City of Chicago (1897) in which the Supreme Court appeared to require some form of just compensation for property appropriated by state or local authorities (although there was a state statute on the books that provided the same guarantee) or, more commonly, to Gitlow v. New York (1925), in which the Court expressly held that States were bound to protect freedom of speech. Since that time, the Court has steadily incorporated most of the significant provisions of the Bill of Rights.
The notion of the incorporation of the establishment of religion on the states wasn't technically done until 1947 (Everson v. Board of Education)