Posted on 09/02/2005 9:02:32 AM PDT by dukeman
Liberal opponents of federal appeals court Judge John Roberts’ ascendancy to the U.S. Supreme Court, thus far unable to tarnish his reputation, face new hurdles on the eve of the nominee’s U.S. Senate confirmation hearings.
They do not know, and cannot find, his opinion on the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet, as some liberal law school professors have come to understand, the Third Amendment is preceded only by the First (Congress shall make no law…) and the Second (right to bare arms during periods of global warming) in numerical order.
A small but equally astute group of liberal activists has begun to surreptitiously e-mail liberal members of the Senate Judiciary Committee warning that Roberts’ renowned powers of persuasion could sway highly suggestible liberal justices on an issue never before heard by the Supreme Court. Several memos have urged that weaker members of the Judiciary Committee not make eye contact with Roberts during the hearings, lest they become mesmerized by his Sphinx-like gaze.
A judicial nominee with no record (or even a demo tape) on an issue without Supreme Court precedent is considered by numerous liberal thought leaders to be a conservative smart bomb that could have devastating fallout on decades of liberal court rulings.
Indeed, Judge Roberts has never spoken publicly on the Third Amendment. Moreover, thousands of pages of documents surrendered to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and there subjected to ideological litmus tests, handwriting analysis and even infrared proctospectrology, yield no clues beyond the vexing secret Federalist Society code that Roberts is alleged to deploy when numbering his points in complex opinions.
Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Third Amendment is deceptively simple, consisting of only 32 words, four commas and a period: “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.”
“How can any American sleep at night not knowing in advance how a Supreme Court Justice will rule on such a consequential issue?” asked Nan Aron, President of the Alliance for Justice (occasionally confused with DC Comics’ Justice League of America). Aron is generally regarded as the most rotund legal mind in more than 100 liberal special interest groups that provide substantial political and financial support to liberal politicians. It has never been alleged that sexual favors are sought in return for those contributions.
“Barbra Streisand is just beside herself with worry,” Aron continued. “Even actors who live in modest 20,000-square-foot houses are calling me at all hours. After begging them to send another Gulfstream full of money, I don’t know what to say.”
Constitutional scholars have long believed that the Third Amendment was intended by the Founders as a prophylactic to the infamous Quartering Act, interpreted by British soldiers before the American Revolution as an excuse to sleep with colonial virgins, steal Rolexes and confiscate popcorn (which Native Americans called “maize”). Several scholars have even postulated that excessive liberties taken under the Quartering Act became the inspiration for the so-called “Easy Living” school of constitutional interpretation, taught primarily at Harvard by law professors under suspension for plagiarism.
In the last month, however, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims to have discovered the frequently rumored “lost” Federalist Papers in a computer hard drive secretly buried by James Madison under Isaac Newton’s apple tree. In the memos, Hersh claims that Madison laid out a conspiracy through which Donald Rumsfeld would eventually become Secretary of Defense, close a host of military bases during the War on Terror and then invoke the Third Amendment to billet thousands of displaced soldiers — including Special Forces snipers, Navy Seals and Marines — in strategically placed waterfront homes of wealthy liberals.
At this writing, not even The New York Times, Hersh’s former employer, has been willing to publish what appear to be little more than the rantings of an angry old man. In early summer, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that local governments may seize private property to give to Donald Trump, thus exacerbating liberal fears that those who routinely carry automatic weapons might act with even greater audacity.
“Hersh is going to get some traction with this stuff, particularly if you also factor in the ‘Manchurian Justice’ theory about [Supreme Court Justice David] Souter. Roberts could well be the pre-arranged catalyst triggering Souter back to conservative opinions,” said Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who earlier this year was forced to retract charges that Rush Limbaugh had ordered Korans flushed down toilets at Limbaugh’s plush Club Gitmo terrorist resort.
“Liberals have every reason to be concerned. The Third Amendment is serious business, ratified by the states in 1791 and challenged only once (Engblom v. Carey) since then, never making it to the Supreme Court,” said John Yoo, a prominent constitutional law professor at the University of California’s Boalt Hall. “The liberals made a major miscalculation and wasted millions of dollars fretting about abortion, French fries and that damn frog when here’s a guy who’s going to take their houses.”
“Bull spectacles,” responded the plain-spoken Fred Dalton Thompson, a former U.S. Senator (R-Tenn.) and star of “Law & Order,” engaged by the White House to shepherd Roberts through confirmation. “Goodness, gracious. Look at the record. The liberal groups and, I might add, the liberal media have been nothing but respectful of Judge Roberts, his family and his career. Had they been deceptive or underhanded or disparaging in any way, then, yeah, he’d vote to take their houses, maybe even their cars and personal trainers. But that hasn’t been the case. Feel the love. It’s mutual. John’s not going to cast the first stone, because what good is a busted up glass house to anyone?”
“Thompson may be correct about Judge Roberts’ judicial temperament and intent,” said UCLA constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh. “And the Fifth Amendment was, before the liberals on the Court masticated it in Kelo, a reasonable protection against property takings. But as a sharply divided Court makes more and more decisions on narrowly framed interpretational lines, the fact that the Third Amendment does precede the Fifth in numerical order could have a highly significant bearing. If Judge Roberts is a true originalist, he can’t escape that. No matter how much he personally loves liberals, he simply cannot allow his personal feelings to cloud his judgment on the Court. If I were, say, Sean Penn or Michael Moore or even Arianna Huffington, I’d be looking for the nearest military recruitment office.”
In keeping with the protocol and demeanor expected of nominees to the Supreme Court, John Roberts would not speak to us for this article, and thus his opinions on the Third Amendment, if he has any, remain as mysterious as the whereabouts of Natalee Holloway, in whose disappearance Roberts has not yet been accused.
Used to be, you could read the Constitution and tell.
<rimshot>
A small but equally astute group of liberal activists has begun to surreptitiously e-mail liberal members of the Senate Judiciary Committee warning that Roberts’ renowned powers of persuasion could sway highly suggestible liberal justices on an issue never before heard by the Supreme Court. Several memos have urged that weaker members of the Judiciary Committee not make eye contact with Roberts during the hearings, lest they become mesmerized by his Sphinx-like gaze.
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The LOONS of the left never cease to amaze me. These morons are SO WORRIED about having an intelligent, law-abiding, Constitution-supporting justice on the court, they now have him casting magic spells on the liberal activists that ARE ON THE SCOTUS!!! Horrors!! A justice that can influence our criminal activists into being good justices --- ahhhhhh!!!! No No No !!!!
I wonder how many people will understand this one...
I'm not happy with the intelligence of FReepers these days, so I don't expect many to get it.
Most people probably think it had to do with George III's bad habit of stationing British soldiers in private homes, but they would be wrong. True enough, George III did so, but not to a large degree.
On the other hand, the best known tyrant of his day, Louis XIV, the "Sun King", issued what were known as the Dragonettes Orders. Here, French military personnel were assigned to live in the homes of Huguenots, as French Protestants were known, and to abuse these people until they agreed to abandoned Protestantism and return to attending mass at a Catholic Church.
Under the Dragonettes Orders, Huguenot women were subject to rape and beatings in their own homes, and their children could be taken away and placed in distant Catholic orphanages.
Eventually, Louis XIV decided to simply kill all the Huguenots. This precipitated a mass exodus from France, accompanied by a massive emigration to America.
Louis XIV's brutality is best recalled in the Third-Amendment, and those who know Huguenot history understand that this is the amendment that makes Protestantism possible, even in the face of an organized state religion (which was not prohibited to the states by the Constitution). Combined with the Second-Amendment, which reflects the Huguenot history of refusing to lay down their arms after the Religious Wars, it's pretty clear that the Bill of Rights has an actual preference for Protestant points of views and liberties.
I really can't imagine Judge Roberts having any desire whatsoever to bring up that sorry episode in world history, but in any case, in America, Catholics as a minority, have come to relish all of these freedoms and liberties as though they, themselves, had been Huguenots fighting against Louis XIV's tyranny.
We are undoubtedly safe from Roberts, although the arch traitor Ginzburg might like to impose her own Dragonettes Orders by quartering troops in people's homes until they agree to become contributing members of the ACLU.
LOL! It's better-written than most jokes. AFAIK, the 3rd Amendment has never come up in the courts.
Oh but it did. It was used by the SCOTUS to support their reasoning in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade (really!):
Griswold v. Connecticut
381 U.S. 479 (1965)
"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.(...) The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy."
STEWART, J. dissenting:
"(...)As to the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, I can find nothing in any of them to invalidate this Connecticut law, even assuming that all those Amendments are fully applicable against the States. It has [381 U.S. 479, 529] not even been argued that this is a law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." And surely, unless the solemn process of constitutional adjudication is to descend to the level of a play on words, there is not involved here any abridgment of "the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." No soldier has been quartered in any house. There has been no search, and no seizure. Nobody has been compelled to be a witness against himself.(...)"
I really doubt Judge Roberts will ever discuss the matter. After all, he's a smart guy and knows what he's looking at.
Good finds, but I didn't mean it in that sense. I meant it as in a lawsuit was brought directly under that amendment as a violation of rights, as the 1st and 4th are often used.
will we perhaps see it in NO in the near future?
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