Which amendment is central to applying the Bill of Rights to the states through incorporation?

• A. Fourteenth Amendment
• B. First Amendment
• C. Fourth Amendment
• D. Sixteenth Amendment

Answer: (A)

The key idea is that state governments become bound by most of the Bill of Rights through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Originally, the Bill of Rights restricted only the federal government; states could do more or less what they wanted. After the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, the Supreme Court read its Due Process Clause as a vehicle to apply many of those federal protections to the states, a process known as incorporation. This isn’t automatic for every right, but through selective incorporation the Court has tied state action to fundamental liberties—beginning with cases like Gitlow v. New York and continuing to how most provisions of the Bill of Rights are enforced against states today. So, the Fourteenth Amendment is the instrument that makes the Bill of Rights binding on the states.

The other amendments you might think of aren’t the mechanism for applying the Bill of Rights to the states. The First Amendment contains rights that are incorporated, but it’s the Fourteenth Amendment that provides the constitutional authority to extend those protections to state governments. The Fourth Amendment also gets applied to the states via incorporation, but it’s not the central vehicle for doing so. The Sixteenth Amendment deals with taxing power and has no role in incorporation.