A variation of Knighted's thread - Which Amendment do you leave?

[The_Man_With_The_Golden_Gun]

This is a variation of Knighted Vorpal Sword’s thread where you take out one amendment from the Bill of Rights. Here, you are eliminating all BUT one. You choose which amendment stays. All others go. Once again, here are the amendments from the Bill of Rights:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

The First Amendment, specifically the parts about freedom of religion (free exercise and no establishment). From the Taliban to the Inquisition, government power and relgion are the most toxic combination known to humanity.

[pravnik]

The third. I have a really small apartment.

[John_Mace]

The 9th. Presumably the others could be reconstructed from this one.

[John_Mace]

*Originally posted by pravnik *
**The third. I have a really small apartment. **

Thanks. That was my best lauch of the day.

[John_Mace]

It was also my best “laugh” of the day…

[DreadCthulhu]

The 2nd. With that, I can simple shoot those who try to violate the other ones.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

The first. Without the first the rest are meaningless.

DreadCthulhu, the right to bear arms != the right to shoot anybody.

[ITR_champion]

Number one.

With that one, it at least isn’t possible for the government to shut down entire political movements by force.

[Menocchio]

The first.

With it, i can agitate for the return of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th. And the others, I suppose.

[DreadCthulhu]

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
**The first. Without the first the rest are meaningless.

DreadCthulhu, the right to bear arms != the right to shoot anybody. **

True, but having firearms does make it easier to shoot people. And it makes it easier to get back other rights, if you have violence as a back-up option.

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by John Mace:

The 9th. Presumably the others could be reconstructed from this one.

Why? In theory, I can see what you’re getting at. But the 9th Amendment has never mattered in all of American history up to now. It has never been dispositive in any important constitutional case. Why would that change?

Based on the various amendments’ relative importance, I would save the First. With free speech guaranteed, we can organize to protect our rights.

But I notice it has not occured to anybody on this thread so far to question how important the Bill of Rights really is in protecting the rights and liberties it enumerates. As Daniel Lazare pointed out in The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1996), pp. 216-217, in the United Kingdom, there is no written Constitution and no suprapolitical Bill of Rights. Parliament can do anything. Nothing is really “unconstitutional” if Parliament decides it should be done. Yet, looking back on the 20th Century, the UK has a much better civil-liberties record than the U.S.:

Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in the late seventies, British liberals have been bemoaning the damage done to civil liberties due to the ever growing concentration of power in the hands of the most right-wing government of the twentieth century. The complaints are quite valid, yet, from an American perspective, need to be taken with a grain of salt. Just as crime in the most economically depressed neighborhood in Glasgow or Liverpool does not compare to crime in Detroit or the South Bronx, civil liberties violations, even during the darkest days of Thatcherism, simply do not compare with what Americans have gotten used to on almost a daily basis. British civil libertarians were up in arms over the strong-arm tactics that Thatcher used to impede mass picketing in the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike. But such methods were in a different league from the Pinochet-like mass firings and arrests that the Reagan administration used to crush the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. Prosecutions of journalists for violations of Britain’s Official Secrets Act are an international scandal, yet they hardly compare to the American treatment of dissidents of one stripe or another, from Mark Hampton, the Black Panther who died in a fusillade of police gunfire in Chicago in 1969, to the Branch Davidians, eighty-one of whom needlessly perished in a federal assault in 1993.

Over the longue duree of the twentieth century, moreover, the discrepancy is even more striking. Despite the absence of a Bill of Rights and judicial review, the British somehow found it within themselves not to throw thousands of radicals in jail immediately after World War I; not to make hundreds of thousands of arrests as part of an absurd crusade against alcohol; not to hound thousands of accused Communists out of jobs and into jail in the forties and fifties; and not to arrest millions more people as part of a neo-Prohibitionist war on drugs. The United States did all these things and more despite being blessed with the more glorious Constitution and Bill of Rights since the dawn of creation. . . .

Where the United States spent much of the twentieth century careening between “hysteria, repression and remorse,” as Arthurh Schlesinger Jr. once put it, British officials somehow kept an even keel. Political debate in Britain is livelier than in the States, the range of political opinion is broader, yet violence does not seem to be forever bubbling up from below. Britain and America share a common history, yet something about their makeup, their constitution, causes them to function according to very different principles.

And the disparity has grown even vaster since 9/11/01.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

*Originally posted by BrainGlutton *Yet, looking back on the 20th Century, the UK has a much better civil-liberties record than the U.S.: . . . (S)uch methods were in a different league from the Pinochet-like mass firings and arrests that the Reagan administration used to crush the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.

What the hell does that have to do with civil liberties? The air traffic controllers were fired for going on strike in violation of their contract, not for anything they said or thought.

Despite the absence of a Bill of Rights and judicial review, the British somehow found it within themselves not to throw thousands of radicals in jail immediately after World War I . . .

They didn’t have to. They’d already thrown thousands of radicals in jail during World War I. Bertrand Russell was one of them.

. . . not to make hundreds of thousands of arrests as part of an absurd crusade against alcohol . . .

Great Britain also enacted severe restrictions on alcohol sales during the 1920’s, although stopping short of total Prohibition. Their Canadian cousins, heirs to the same constitutional tradition with (at that time) no written Bill of Rights, enacted total Prohibition.

. . . not to hound thousands of accused Communists out of jobs and into jail in the forties and fifties . . .

All this talk about “thousands” is making me queasy. A total of 93 Americans were jailed under the Smith Act during the 1950’s.

. . . and not to arrest millions more people as part of a neo-Prohibitionist war on drugs.

Drugs are just as illegal in Great Britain as in the United States.

I wonder if the Irish share this benign view of Twentieth Century Britons as paragons of civil liberty.

Yeah, our government does tend to encroach on our liberties–both civil and economic. That’s the nature of government, everywhere on Earth. If the UK can get along without a written Bill of Rights, God bless 'em. But you’re not going to convince me that their record is so much better than ours as to invalidate the concept.

[SenorBeef]

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
**The first. Without the first the rest are meaningless.

DreadCthulhu, the right to bear arms != the right to shoot anybody. **

Indeed, but I think “anybody” and “those who try to violate the other ones” are quite different groups there.

[Debaser]

On it’s own merit, I would say the first. Freedom of religion, the press, speech, assembly, etc. This one definately has the most bang for it’s buck.

However, I would have to choose the tenth. This would just be the most practical. Instead of limiting specifically things that the federal government can and can’t do, we would limit everything to the states that isn’t in the constitution itself. We would just have to rely on the states to pass reasonable laws. If actually enforced, this would prevent the federal government from growing too large and trambling the would be other ammendments.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

*Originally posted by DreadCthulhu *
**The 2nd. With that, I can simple shoot those who try to violate the other ones. **

The day Cthulhu has to rely on the second amendment to protect Its rights is the day I stop dreading the alignment of the stars.

Daniel

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by Debaser:

However, I would have to choose the tenth. This would just be the most practical. Instead of limiting specifically things that the federal government can and can’t do, we would limit everything to the states that isn’t in the constitution itself. We would just have to rely on the states to pass reasonable laws. If actually enforced, this would prevent the federal government from growing too large and trambling the would be other ammendments.

??? What makes you think state governments can better be trusted to respect civil liberties than the federal government? American history suggests exactly the opposite conclusion. Have you never heard of Jim Crow? The Sovereignty Commissions? Huey Long’s reign in Louisiana (which included a period of martial law)? Reagan’s California? And corrupt machine politics (mostly a thing of the past, now) always existed only at the local and state level, never the federal.

Furthermore, the Tenth Amendment never mattered before. In all our history, it has never been dispositive in a single important constitutional case. Constitutional scholars mostly consider it a dead letter, just like the Ninth Amendment. Why would that change?

[MrTuffPaws]

Another vote for the 2nd. The people can assure their other freedoms by force if necessary.

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by MrTuffPaws:

Another vote for the 2nd. The people can assure their other freedoms by force if necessary.

No, actually, they can’t, not even if they’re armed to the teeth. Just ask the Iraqis.

[Jonathan_Chance]

I’m a media guy. I’ve got to go with the first.

And the power of vox populi will, in the long term, outdo firearms seven ways from Sunday.