Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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> Heavily armed government agents whose main function is to perform escalating violence are clearly a type of soldier.

Sure .. but the document in question is the Constitution of the United States .. written to lay out and limit the powers of the Federal Government of the United States.

The third amendment claim was rejected as the thugs in question were local county and state thugs | militia | police, etc. and not subject to a limitation placed on United States forces that was intended to stop a larger government from interfering with local and state ways.

> So it seems that there were not any lower laws prohibiting this government-sponsored gang activity

So that's a state problem then - the citizens of that state should seek to limit what hired thugs can do "on their behalf".

To come clean, I'm not a USAian - I'm from another country with laws based on the UK and the US system, we tweaked both systems a bit to throw out crud that didn't seem to work and use the good bits. Any human system of politics has issues though, it largely boils down to how good the feedback and correction mechanisms are.

It's a good thing they don't have to bother upholding those other pesky enumerated rights too.

The salient detail would be a strong distinction of soldiers from police forces. It's only because of the strongly kept distinction that it's notable when federal military personnel are deployed in response to riots, natural disasters, or other national emergencies.

See also the related, but opposite in participant and realm of action, Posse Comitatus Act,

> signed on June 18, 1878 ... limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.

> updated it in 1956, 1981 and 2021.

I would not have known about its recent updates without this diversion:

> In 2021, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 further expanded the scope of the Act to cover the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force

But not the Army nor Air National Guards of states, nor the Coast Guard, since law enforcement is part of its mission.

https://en-wp.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

The distinction has its own wikipedia page discussing the long history of its relevance, at least 146 years.

https://en-wp.org/wiki/Separation_of_military_and_police_rol...

The Posse Comitatus Act is roughly a century after the Revolution. Being an easier-amendable congressional law means the wording can be much more precise, calling out each branch of military specifically. And yet even still, some of those branches have domestic law enforcement duties.

The third amendment was a reaction to the large amount of British troops being embedded throughout society, with those troops performing domestic law enforcement duties. So I'd say that regardless of the split that developed later, domestic law enforcement falls wholly within the 1700's meaning of soldiers. It's not like the founders were against externally-facing standing armies but just peachy keen on internally-facing standing armies.

It seems you're missing that the Constitution often is construed as placing restrictions on the states, to be enforced by the federal government. It's not purely just restriction on what the federal government can do, rather that is an argument often trotted out by other entities justifying their infringement of rights. Sometimes this argument works, but just as often it does not. Hence this case continuing on first/fourth amendment grounds despite it being about local law enforcement.

Totally agreed on feedback and correction mechanisms, and applying systems thinking in general. I'd say the US Constitution was a good first attempt but by no means a robust system, but yet we're now stuck appealing to it or judges inventing principles out of whole cloth (aka common law) as the main check against sprawling federal power. Not that we aren't also taking that federal power for granted as it's keeping other sprawling power structures in check.

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