Beowulf right to Leave the SL

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Tenshinai,
I usually agree with you, but in this case it seems that
you overlooked the clause in Article 2:
"The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army
(and the Navy)"

This shows (to the standard you are arguing by) that
the USA was indeed intended to have an Army.

HTJM

Tenshinai wrote:
[snip - htm]

Anyone neutral in the question, with half-decent linguist/English skills, will state that 2nd amendment refers to militia rights, as **the USA was originally meant to not have any army at all** (as that was seen as leading to imperialism and foreign ventures), with individuals forming a militia replacing that, because not reading it like that makes the text itself nonsensical and internally inconsistent.

[snip - htm]

Um. Yes and no. If you read Article I you'll see that the federal government has a right to raise an army but that it cannot be funded for more than 2 years without renewed approval by Congress (which would not have been forthcoming from the Senate if anyone was planning to use the Army to suppress the states). I think 2 years is the correct interval, but I'd have to go back and check to be sure. That is, the US could raise a national army, but not a permanent standing army. Unless I am mistaken, and I haven't checked, that provision still stands and is part of the annual battle over Defense Appropriations. Despite that, I don't think anyone could doubt that what we have is a permanent, standing army, and all of the military branches are allowed to commit to contracts which run over the 2-year statutory period . As I say, I haven't checked that, so I may be wrong.

At any rate, when the Founders wrote Article I, the purposes they envisioned for were to provide the states with a domestic peacekeeping force in time of peace and to provide the country as a whole with a "quick reaction" force (in time of war) until a true army could be raised, if needed. Note that the Navy was specifically regarded as a standing force. The reasoning there was that a Navy could pose no threat too domestic rights (can't sail a ship to someplace like Atlanta) and so posed no threat of "federal tyranny," and because building ships and training skilled officers to command them took time. This, alas, also reflects the Founders rather naïve belief in the ability of part-time militia officers to command large bodies of troop without formal training. That belief was part of the Revolution's fundamental mythic foundations, despite our need for Baron von Steuben, and it continued through the Civil War.

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.

runsforcelery wrote:...
...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.

Is the example of the Mayhew restoration likely to give any hints as to the fate of the Solarian Constitution?

It seems like the Keys' usurpation of governance without modifying the written constitution has a lot of similarities to the SL Bureaucracy.

JohnRoth wrote:Third: pragmatic. At the time the amendment was framed and voted on, the typical hand weapon would have been a club, knife or sword. Pistols of the era were single shot muzzle loaders. Breach loading rifles did exist - the Ferguson comes to mind - but they were still single shot. The modern cartridge hadn't been invented. Anyone who invokes the framers in the argument is talking intent, not the text. The framers of the Constitution are, of course, all safely dead and unreachable to join in the discussion. I, however, seriously doubt that they would have agreed that fully automatic machine guns were appropriate weapons for self-defense.

At the risk of dirving this this thread further off the rails, I will say that while you have a point about the technology of the time, it's also true that merchant ships fairly regularly carried cannons (like those of warships; but usually lighter ones and in far fewer numbers.

But there wasn't any clear distinction made in the wording of the 2nd amendment between personal weapons and the heavier weapons which existing at the time.


So maybe the founders wouldn't want you to own a machine gun, but a cannon might be ok

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.

And some of them objected because if you make a list of rights it, in practice, tends to remove any other rights you failed to enumerate (regardless of how self-evident everyone at the time perceived them to be)

There were a lot of different opinions during the Constitutional Conventions which is why the resulting document is an interesting series of compromises.

Weird Harold wrote:Is the example of the Mayhew restoration likely to give any hints as to the fate of the Solarian Constitution?

It seems like the Keys' usurpation of governance without modifying the written constitution has a lot of similarities to the SL Bureaucracy.

I would argue that there is no direct correlation between the two. On Grayson, the Keys had stolen the power of governance from its rightful owner, the Protector. With Benjamin's Restoration, that power reverted to its original, and legal, owner. In the League, the bureaucracy hadn't stolen the power, they picked it up from where it was flopping on the ground. There is no one who can take back that power, because no one really had it in the first place.

cadastral wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Is the example of the Mayhew restoration likely to give any hints as to the fate of the Solarian Constitution?

It seems like the Keys' usurpation of governance without modifying the written constitution has a lot of similarities to the SL Bureaucracy.

I would argue that there is no direct correlation between the two. On Grayson, the Keys had stolen the power of governance from its rightful owner, the Protector. With Benjamin's Restoration, that power reverted to its original, and legal, owner. In the League, the bureaucracy hadn't stolen the power, they picked it up from where it was flopping on the ground. There is no one who can take back that power, because no one really had it in the first place.

This is a valid distinction, even if the consequences in the two star nations have a great deal of similarity.

I think it's safe to say, however, that the Solarian League isn't going to fix its problems by "restoring" a constitution which was fatally flawed from its inception.

No idea where else they might go, of course.

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Third: pragmatic. At the time the amendment was framed and voted on, the typical hand weapon would have been a club, knife or sword. Pistols of the era were single shot muzzle loaders. Breach loading rifles did exist - the Ferguson comes to mind - but they were still single shot. The modern cartridge hadn't been invented. Anyone who invokes the framers in the argument is talking intent, not the text. The framers of the Constitution are, of course, all safely dead and unreachable to join in the discussion. I, however, seriously doubt that they would have agreed that fully automatic machine guns were appropriate weapons for self-defense.

At the risk of dirving this this thread further off the rails, I will say that while you have a point about the technology of the time, it's also true that merchant ships fairly regularly carried cannons (like those of warships; but usually lighter ones and in far fewer numbers.

But there wasn't any clear distinction made in the wording of the 2nd amendment between personal weapons and the heavier weapons which existing at the time.


So maybe the founders wouldn't want you to own a machine gun, but a cannon might be ok

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.

And some of them objected because if you make a list of rights it, in practice, tends to remove any other rights you failed to enumerate (regardless of how self-evident everyone at the time perceived them to be)

There were a lot of different opinions during the Constitutional Conventions which is why the resulting document is an interesting series of compromises.

Okay, I wasn't going to say another word supporting this whole topic drift, but I would like to point out that there is a distinct difference between field artillery stored in the basement of the local town hall (or local mafioso equivalent) and the broadside guns of a trading ship which might find itself necessary to protect itself against pirates or Barbary Corsairs just about anywhere except on the Great Lakes. For one thing, small arms suffice against those threats. For another thing, guns mounted aboard the ship in New York Harbor are pretty darn useless for threatening the governor in Albany. That is, armed merchant vessels — like a standing Navy — would not be viewed as a threat to the government or the citizens of the United States, whereas a battery of 12-pounder field pieces certainly could be construed that way.

runsforcelery wrote: For another thing, guns mounted aboard the ship in New York Harbor are pretty darn useless for threatening the governor in Albany.

In a case of science fiction meeting science fact, the U.S. Navy is in the final stages of development of a ship mounted railgun that could throw a shell 100km. So we soon will be at the point where a ship in New York Harbor can threaten the governor.
I don't think most private citizens would be able to afford the power plant, much less the weapon.

pablopinzone wrote:In a case of science fiction meeting science fact, the U.S. Navy is in the final stages of development of a ship mounted railgun that could throw a shell 100km. So we soon will be at the point where a ship in New York Harbor can threaten the governor.
I don't think most private citizens would be able to afford the power plant, much less the weapon.

100 km? You'd be lucky to hit Poughkeepsie.

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.

It also appears to me that there is a great deal of "might makes right" at play as well. To throw in another hot political topic, the Mandarins' attitude toward Beowulf reminds me a great deal of Putin's attitude toward the Crimea. Except that in Putin's case he really did have the might to back up his attitude while in the case of the SL their might is in their own heads.