elinghuysen, who opposed the Blaine amendment, stated that "The Blaine Amendment very properly extends the prohibition of the first amendment of the Constitution to the States. Thus the Blaine Amendment prohibits the States, for the first time, from the establishment of religion, from prohibiting its free exercise, and from making any religious test a qualification to office." Senator Eaton of Connecticut, and others with the same objections to the Blaine Amendment, felt that the Constitution prevented congressional involvement in the peoples religious lives, and that the states should be left to make their own decisions on the matter. The Blaine Amendment was proposed to the House, passed, and then defeated in the Senate. It would be proposed to congress and defeated over and over again for the next 50 years, but not abandoned until the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the states making the Blaine Amendment superfluous. In 1908 The United States Supreme Court reviewed a series of cases "in which the states were held not bound by the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment, the right to a grand jury indictment guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment right to be confronted by one's accusers, or the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury in civil cases." This did not mean that none of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights could be applied to the states. It simply meant that because the federal government was prohibited from doing something by the Bill of Rights, did not mean that the states were subject to the same prohibitions. State courts continued to maintain that the religion clauses of the First Amendment were not applicable to state actions. "In a case in 1908, for example, two Roman Catholics, two Jews, and one person who ‘does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible,' sued their school board in Texas to stop...
