A 50 caliber beats yapping.
The third seems almost a subset of the 4th. But if we ever get to the place where we need to quarter soldiers the US will be in a low and dark place and I doubt words on paper will matter.
Again – and I can’t stress this enough, because I’d genuinely love for someone to point out what I’ve been missing all these years – think of every time Congress has declared war even though things haven’t yet gotten so low and dark that we’ve needed to quarter soldiers. What did the Third Amendment do, in all of those cases?
“Well, let’s see; here’s the part explaining that Congress shall make no law about various things; that’s still in effect. And the stuff about double jeopardy, that’s still in play. And cruel and unusual punishments, they’re still off the table. Ah, here it is: Congress can quarter soldiers in the manner it prescribes. Gosh, isn’t that super!”
You doubt that “words on paper” will matter then? As far as I can tell, those particular words haven’t mattered ever. (How could they? Are we postulating a Congress that feels like quartering soldiers, but doesn’t wanna vote ‘aye’?)
The Third Amendment does prohibit the peacetime quartering that the colonials actually had a problem with.
What good is it to limit the peacetime power of the Congress that declares war?
I neither want to hijack the thread nor drone on repetitively, but just imagine rewriting the other Amendments likewise: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, unless Congress first passes a law saying both of those are okay. (Or maybe: the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted – until, y’know, Congress says that Congress can say otherwise.)
What, we needed a whole Constitutional Amendment to enshrine that two-step? The rest of them are there to place rights beyond the reach of the legislature, and this one says the legislature just needs to vote themselves the ability to vote on it?
Oh, my ! Yes.
Here’s my annotated list:
9, then 10: This whole revolution thing was about limiting the power of government and we’ve totally forgotten that today. The current assumption is that the government can do anything it wants unless the Constitution says otherwise, but it was explicitly written to be the opposite. The government (federal, at least) can do nothing unless the Constitution says otherwise. In some ways, the rest of the amendments are redundant because they all limit government power that was never granted in the first place.
1: Limitations on your ability to speak and congregate would affect our daily lives so much more than the other items here.
2: I kind of gave this opinion on another thread recently. Even aside from the idea of citizen-soldiers resisting the federal government, allowing citizens to own firearms gives them a valuable resource to protect them from an uncertain future. Whether there are wars, disasters, crime, etc. if you are in a situation where you need a gun, you can have it.
5,6,7: Guaranteed jury trials are a big deal. It means that a determined citizenry can gut any law they want to by refusing to convict, and it means that a government cannot get too complacent about locking people up indefinitely or rubber-stamping convictions. For all their failings a jury of one’s peers is valuable.
4,8: In principle, I would tend to rate these higher, but the problem is that terms like “probable cause” are so flexible that this amendment shoots itself in the foot. I would say that these amendments have been pretty well implemented and protected in actual practice, but that their wording makes them easy to circumvent. The Nazis would have had no problem defining probable cause, excessive bail and cruel and unusual to suit their needs.
3: Hard to place this one, really. Because it is present, we don’t ever think about it, but we could imagine a scenario in which the US had no military barracks and required every family to house a soldier at their own expense, as part of a permanent state of affairs. Still, I place it at the bottom because I feel like modern armies would not rely on quartering soldiers with civilians the way they once did. You don’t see it happening much elsewhere in the world.
Wouldn’t that “at their own expense” bit fall under the 5th Amendment’s language regarding just-compensation-for-private-property-taken-for-public-use stuff?
I’d put the Third last - it’s the most obviously “dated” of all of them. Just because some people choose to vastly over-emphasize the Second doesn’t mean it’s entirely useless.
Here is a recent Third Amendment case.
Perhaps, but the Fifth does have this clause: “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;”
In the age of ISIS, that’s all the justification Trump needs.
Does that just apply to the Grand Jury section, or to all of it?
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Here is a recent Third Amendment case.
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Rejected, wasn’t it?
The claim was dismissed in federal district court, but the article suggests that the judge’s reasoning may have been too easy. At the least, I think it says that the Third is not irrelevant to present-day situations, and I expect to see it in the courts again. It was certainly not frivolous.
Congress doesn’t have the ability to quarter soldiers except at war-time (I would expect it would require an actual declaration of war). It also means that in time of war the president can’t decide to quarter soldiers (or in my interpretation FBI agents) without congress saying so which is a limitation on executive war powers.
Also don’t forget Engblom v. Carey.
Oh, that’s a good point. So you’d at least have to be paid to have soldiers hanging out in your living room.
I agree. The term soldier was interpreted too specifically in a way that could mean that a Sailor, airman, marine, or FBI agent could be quartered in your house as long as their army buddies are meant to be outside. One of the objections to quartering had to be the fact that it amounted to a search and monitoring of a home and a major invasion of privacy.
IMHO soldier should be interpreted as government agent in the third amendment.
1, 4/5/6 (any order, really), 2, 8, 7, 10, 9. If you’d asked, the 14th would have come right after the First since it doesn’t much matter to me whether it’s the federal or state government trampling on my rights.