USA is literally founded on this principle:
Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment" rights.
Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment" rights.
There is a third popular opinion, which is that the convention had been a hot, contentious affair that dragged on for months and everyone wanted to go home so they tabled the bill of rights for a later date.
You will note that none of these reasons is that anyone objected to the principles in the bill of rights. More importantly, many of the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are directly targeted at the causes of the revolution. This lends significant credence to the "it's important but let's not do it now" argument, and undercuts rather dramatically the idea that the country was not founded on those ideals.
Of course, both of them turned out to be wrong. Not only people think that rights that are not explicitly enumerated do not deserve protection, not only the idea of limited government bound by constitutional limits is completely dead and buried, now people think that explicitly named rights too can be violated at will. Maybe because they have been spelled out a bit later, so they can't be that important. After all, First Amendment isn't something that's very important, that's why they made it the first one. Like the trial one, we'll do some silly stuff first, to warm up, and then we'll get to really important things.
The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788. The 1st Congress convened in March of 1789, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in June of 1789. I think it is quite reasonable to consider the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights as part of the foundational principles of the nation.