The Thing About Laws

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.

I almost skipped over this one, because let's face it, this just doesn't come up very much nowadays.  We haven't had a war on U.S. soil in over 150 years, so the reality of roaming brigades of soldiers commandeering the family farm and making demands on the citizenry is not really a thing that anybody worries about.  Even if we did have a military deployment in this country, we have an extensive infrastructure here already, and as the military has demonstrated more than necessary lately, they can build their own houses even on foreign soil.
So what is important about this?  Is it just a historical lesson?  If I remember my history classes correctly a lot of what went into this document was a response to the excesses and over-reaching of the British Crown.  The Quartering Act was one of the four "coercive" acts passed by Parliament to crack down on the disagreeable belligerence of the colonies (like wasting all that perfectly good tea, never get between a Brit and their tea).  In order to flex their imperial muscles a bit, and to kill two birds with one stone, they said that the Empire had the right to occupy public houses and unoccupied space in order to shelter the increasing number of redcoats that were necessary to maintain decency and order in the colonies.
As is usually the case with such things it rather quickly exceeded it's intended scope, and as antagonism grew so did the danger to the safety of the colonists.  To people trying to make a go of it in the harsh New World, life was precarious enough without having to shelter and feed a platoon of soldiers who you didn't particularly want there. Not to mention the rather predictable assaults on the virtue of wives and daughters, and maybe even sons, by armed men far from home.  Now I'm not sure of exactly how all this played out, but we have stories, and I'm guessing that behind all of those stories is some kernel of truth, and it probably wasn't rated PG.
At any rate the people who lived through this were rather keen on making sure that this new Government didn't start down that road, so they added this to the Bill of Rights.  This also foreshadows the principle of the sovereignty of the individual that is going to shape many of the coming amendments.  Statutory protection of the people from the abuse of those in power is rather important principle for a democratic-ish republic to have.  They had had enough of kings and emperors, and their armies.  In fact, there was this idea, in the beginning, that maybe we didn't even need a standing army, in fact the colonists tended to distrust such things for reasons that might be apparent above.  Watching the British burn Washington DC to the ground in the war of 1812 brought an end to that nonsense.  Nation states need armies, militias are not going to cut it, as we talked about yesterday.  They need men (and women now) who are trained and supplied and thoroughly prepared to engage in disciplined combat against other trained and supplied forces.
The maintenance of such a force requires a professional and perpetual effort, not ad-hoc enlistment of gun-ho yokels with muskets.  You cannot and should not maintain this force by imposing upon the citizens directly, so as much as we hate taxes, they are a necessity.  The alternative is having poorly trained and disciplined militia staying in your den and harassing your women folk en route to losing whatever skirmish they got in rather badly.
As much as I dislike war, I understand the necessity of the military, and I am thankful that those who serve are well trained and well equipped, and I'm glad they're not camped in my back yard.
Okay, so that's that right?  Well, there's another important thing that I think Amendment III demonstrates: laws are meant to address certain things at certain times.  Some, like Amendment I tend towards universal "self-evident" truths, but most of them are going to live their lives and maintain usefulness in perpetuity primarily as mileposts and markers in history.  That is good and right, but it throws up a challenge to those who seem to want to hit the rewind button and go back to the original intent of the Constitution and govern according to the Bill of Rights (which is something I believe I heard Ted Cruz say in one of the debates). There are only ten of them, and Amendment X says that there absolutely should be more coming (but I'm getting ahead of myself).
Next up: Secure Persons.