Let's see... we've got two parties that hate the 1st amendment - or love it; they just pick their favorite parts. The democrats hate the second. The republicans dislike the fourth (nobody worries about the third). Republicans seem to dislike the fifth recently, at least parts of it, and the democrats are attempting to evade the sixth (speedy trial) but the republicans are historical enemies of some other applications of it - like free lawyers. The seventh nobody worries about. Number 8 is warped by both parties, it seems; one abuses it to try to prevent all punishments, particularly execution; the other abuses it by dealing with some citizens disrespectfully in their captivity - I'm not sure these rights apply to non-citizens, so I'll leave the whole gitmo thing out of it. The democrats certainly hate the 9th; they are always trying to add powers to the government, and to the 10th, because they try to add them at the federal level and ignore enumerated powers as much as they can.

As for checks and balanced, the republicans have recently been catching up with the democrats, who had a huge head start in creating an imperial presidency (FDR tried to pack the supreme court - Bush hasn't been so crazy). But maybe the democrats were just trying to catch up with Lincoln, who made the presidency and the federal government much more powerful than it was ever supposed to be.

Anyway, to say that one party or the other is the staunch defenders of the constitution requires that you read the constitution their way exclusively. We'd have to dismantle much of the federal government, and revoke a few court decisions like Gitlow v NY, 1925; returning to stare decisis Barron v Baltimore; to get the constitution back in any meaningful form. We might also have to break up a whole bunch of the states to return them to their intended scale.

Oh well. But lets not have all sorts of self-righteousness coming from the democrats about the constitution.