# Soloman Amendment Upheld - Law Schools Cannot Ban Military Recruiters **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 6, 2006, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soloman-amendment-upheld-law-schools-cannot-ban-military-recruiters/347276 "2006-03-06T18:32:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soloman-amendment-upheld-law-schools-cannot-ban-military-recruiters/347276/81 "2006-03-10T14:10:34Z")
> [@Mr. Moto](#): > > Bullcrap. Frankly, in time of war, there is no constitutional prohibition against the quartering of troops. The Third Amendment would then only require that their quartering be done according to laws passed by Congress. “In time of war”?? Define, please. Are there combat troop movements on or near domestic soil? I don’t see any. > [@](#): > > Seeing as we are in a war right now, Congress could explicitly require the hosting of military units on college campuses, far more than requiring mere recruitment there. This was done in WWII, and created no constitutional crisis that I can see. WWII was at least a _war_, and a total one at that. Ration books. Scrap metal drives. The problem is, if we’re at war now, then we were at war continuously from 1941 to 1991, and then again from 2001 through who knows when. (What does ‘done’ look like?) And even then, conservatives would say - have said - we were at war from 1993 on (since the first WTC bombing), but Clinton was too dumb to realize it. So we’ve been _not_ at war for somewhere between 2 and 10 years out of the past 64. So let’s define ‘war’, please, in a way so that it’s not a nearly perpetual state. > [@](#): > > Your concerns are overblown. You believe yourself to be vigilant, but you come across as paranoid. And you have said which sort of conservative you are. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Moto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de0a6/32.png) [@Mr.Moto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Moto)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soloman-amendment-upheld-law-schools-cannot-ban-military-recruiters/347276/82 "2006-03-10T16:14:51Z")
No. We are not discussing the relative merits of policy right now, are we? Stationing units on an unwilling and unwelcoming college campus (like, say, Yale, which kicked ROTC off campus in 1969) would be terrible policy, which is why the military does not do it. However, bad policy or no, it wouldn’t be unconstitutional in the least, and I fail to see how a court would find it so, given the broad power Congress has to raise and fund an army, and the fact that the Third Amendment clearly applies to a home only, and only then in peacetime or according to laws Congress might pass in a war. Same with the Solomon Amendment. It may well be bad policy (I think it isn’t, but I will allow for differences of opinion here). However, it is clearly constitutional. As to what kind of conservative I am, I generally am the sort who wouldn’t want to rejigger an otherwise clear amendment just because I have certain policy preferences. Such things can be handled quite well with ordinary legislation and regulation, as has historically been done with the military, its basing, and its recruitment. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2006, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soloman-amendment-upheld-law-schools-cannot-ban-military-recruiters/347276/83 "2006-03-11T01:04:50Z")
> [@Mr. Moto](#): > > bad policy or no, it wouldn’t be unconstitutional in the least IYHO. Yours and mine seem to disagree. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/soloman-amendment-upheld-law-schools-cannot-ban-military-recruiters/347276.md?page=4)