Commodore Oakius wrote:HungryKing wrote:It is more complicated than that. Some of the framers though including a bill of rights was redundant, mostly because the individual states had bills of rights.
That is true, that states had their own Bills of Rights, but the Bill of Rights to the Consitution was to be the great equalizer, so that all the states would be on equal footing with these basic "rights." Now the right are federally protected, as opposed to state only.
actually, the Bill of Rights was written without any real thought of seeing to it that "all the states would be on an equal footing with these basic "rights."" It was written specifically to ensure that the Federal government couldn't/wouldn't infringe these rights. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment that the federally guaranteed rights became universally guaranteed rights. There was considerable debate at the time as to whether or not a separate Bill of Rights was required, and the arguments against having one ranged all the way from "well, everybody knows we have these rights because we fought a revolution to secure them" to "well, I agree it would be a bad idea for the federal government to do something like that, but the time might arise when a national emergency would make it necessary." The main argument for putting them in and listing them so specifically was "we fought a revolution to overthrow/escape from a government which trampled on our fundamental rights, so it would be a really, really good idea to list them in one place and tell our new government 'You can't do these things,' to make sure we don't have to do it again anytime soon."
For example, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, in particular, are clearly designed to prevent the federal government from saying "a national emergency has made it necessary to conduct warrantless searches and, if we find anything, we can compel you to testify against yourself in a court of law " This is one of the reasons we have people arguing about slippery slopes right now with NSA, the Patriot Act, court-required revelation of a reporter's confidential sources, etc. Speaking strictly for myself I find it a difficult balancing act between recognizing that a right once given up is practically impossible to reclaim without bloodshed and the inarguable fact that there are enemies out there who would like to kill large numbers of American citizens. Many of those who argue for the universal applicability of the Second Amendment point out that it comes second in a list of ten, immediately after the guarantee of freedom of speech and before any of the other, later amendments that virtually everyone agrees do and ought to have universal applicability and routinely trump the convenience of government. Philosophically, it can be argued (I am throwing this out for consideration, not to pick any fights with anyone) that the fundamental rights of a free state — which is what the fourth through ninth amendments enumerate — depend first on the right and ability of the citizens of that state to assemble and have freedom of speech and that the Founders fear of a federal tyranny clearly recognized that their own freedom of speech and assembly against the British Crown had been secured only by force of arms in the hands of citizens willing to oppose their own government's authority on the field about.
Actually, he said again — urrrgh, pant, gasp, strain heave (damn this thing is heavy) — trying to drag the thread back on topic, these same sorts of issues and disagreements are at the heart of the Solarian League's difficulties in the Honorverse. Unfortunately for the League, the fact that the League's constitution has been a dead letter (because it's been ignored) for so long means that the clearly, sharply, and often divisively articulated contrasting views which are part of the US experience in discussing things like the Second Amendment have not been part of the SL's legal DNA for entirely too long. This means that those who pass as "constitutional experts" in the League are largely free to pick and choose and assemble their viewpoints without the degree of challenge they would receive in the present-day US political environment.
This is also something that I played with an Haven's case, when a constitution very similar to that of the United States ceased to apply. In Haven's case, however, the corrupt governing elite had sufficient power to effectively replace the constitution it proposed to violate. In the Solarian League's case, while the Mandarins and the bureaucracy have usurped all the power required to govern, they've never acquired the power to directly legislate or amend the constitution. And they have been very careful not to open the amendment can of worms even through their mouthpiece/puppet members of the Assembly because once the amending genie is out of the bottle, God only knows where it might end. It many ways, much as I personally despise the Mandarins (don't know if that shows in the books
), it's hard to blame them. They have this immense legal and regulatory structure, which has accreted like a huge coral reef over centuries and which by and large (and by Solarian standards) has worked remarkably well over that stretch of years. If someone starts changing bits and pieces of it in any major way, then they run the risk of the entire thing flying apart. Some may argue this would be a good thing, on the basis that whatever replaced it had to be better, but no one has repealed the Law of Unintended Consequences in the Solarian League any more than they have repealed it anywhere else. So Kolokoltsov and the others probably deserve to be cut at least a teeny tiny bit of slack when it comes to resisting fundamental change to the system.
rganized militia"/national guard as a deterrent (for good or ill) on Federal authority/overreach (definitions of which are which will vary).