It seemed more important in the 18th Century.

Some time ago I wrote about the First Amendment and the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The third installment of my impromptu series on the Bill of Rights has been slowed by the fact that nobody knows what it says. This isn’t one of those Amendments that comes up in Supreme Court cases all the time; it’s not one the ACLU or the NRA has to rant about. In fact, this Amendment has worked so well I can’t imagine anyone wanting to violate it.

If you’d like the context, the whole Bill of Rights is right here, but the part we need says:

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.

Remember, this was important enough to guys like Jefferson and Madison that they stuck it right in there between the right to bear arms and the right to be secure in your own home. As the title says, it was a bigger deal back then. quartering of British troops in private homes was a big issue prior to and during the American Revolution, a British tradition of necessity, and in fact one of the grievances mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

It worked like this: Farmer Jones would open his door one day to find a British Officer informing him that two dozen men would be staying on his property for an indefinate period of time. Farmer Jones would be expected to make accomodations, feed them all their meals, and maybe even see to their laundry and entertainment until such time as the soldiers moved on. Woe be to Farmer Jones if he did not see to his guests properly, and woe to Farmer Jones’s daughters in any event (if Farmer or Mrs. Jones were clever and had any sort of warning, the girls might be sent away into the woods to fend for themselves — for their own protection).

This was a big enough and bad enough problem that it was worth writing not just a law, but a Constitutional guaranty that it would never happen in peacetime, and during war would require a special act of Congress.

In closing: help for those of you trying to lose weight this year; by way of follow-up I am not the only one who says software sucks, but Harvard is willing to say software sucks because of programmers; another follow-up, somebody is trying to do something about the problem of kids with no health insurance; a tidbit on the problems with eVoting in Florida points out that “Some observers have suggested that the 18,000 voters simply did not vote in the District 13 race; others claim the touch-screen ballots did not record the votes,” but the real problem is that without a paper trail we will never know which; rapists are the number one cause of rape, causing 100% of them; a quarter of start-up companies in the United States are started by people who weren’t born here; some friendly advice for the Democrats; and Wil Wheaton is mad about it and you should be too, once again the President has used a signing statement to undermine a bill as he makes it a law, and asserts his right to violate the Fourth Amendment while he is at it.