Many moderns are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner. Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law.
Some of the amendments in our beleaguered Bill of Rights are alive and kicking, as we see with the First and Second. Some are a dead letter through neglect and abuse, such as the Tenth. And some are a dead letter, like the Third, because the way we do things has largely passed this circumstance by. Quartering troops, once common practice, is common practice no longer. The amendment reflects the circumstances of the day.
So what compares today then? If the Bill of Rights were being considered today, the Third Amendment would involve airport security, not quartering troops. The Third Amendment addresses just one particular instance of the universal tendency of government to aggrandize more and more power to itself. Thomas Jefferson, quoting one of Oliver Cromwell’s men, once said that he could not believe that millions of men had saddles on their backs, with a privileged few booted and spurred, and ready to ride.
What happens is that those in power view everything in the light of what increases their power, making it easier for them to wield. The people themselves generally put up with it for a time, as incremental change follows incremental change. Then one day you show up at the airport two hours early, in order to allow time for the long security lines, for the TSA porn scanner, and the opportunity to be groped by someone in a bus driver’s uniform. As you are winding your long way through that security line conga dance, opening bags, taking off belts, shucking off shoes, removing computers from their cases, and generally mooing along with the rest of the herd, answer me this. Why are you doing all this? Why, to preserve your liberties! George Orwell, call your office. But then one day the lights come on in a bunch of minds at the same time, and there is a very edifying commotion at Gate D18.
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I do believe that Islamic terrorism is a real threat, and I further believe that something should be done about it. I also believe that our booted and spurred masters are not serious about that threat, and that they are serious about aggrandizing as much legal power as they can, while they can, in the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
When troops were quartered in a private residence, against the wishes of the owner, there may well have been a real national security threat far away that required them to have been mustered. But that distant threat was not something that affected the daily life of the house owner. The daily irritants of quartering troops in the meantime added up, and eventually got to a tipping point. They had their kind of commotion at their equivalent of Gate D18. And so this is why there is an amendment prohibiting this kind of thing in the Bill of Rights, and there is no amendment prohibiting Hessian mercenaries from conducting training maneuvers inimical to the interests of the United States, somewhere across the sea. Note that the Third Amendment was designed to interfere with national security. If our proud lordlings, progressives and neo-cons both, were better students of history than they are, they would see that their practice of overreaching, in order to advance what they think is good for us, is the very mentality that the Consitution was designed to frustrate and thwart.
As Daniel Defoe once put it, in fine mettle . . .
When kings the sword of justice first lay down;
They art no kings, though they posess the crown;
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.