This is an entertaining approach to something the author obviously considers a serious topic. For someone who has chosen to write on this topic, I find much of what he says here to be a serious misunderstanding. There is no "right" to petition to become a privateer. Congress simply has the power to confer that license upon individuals. T…
This is an entertaining approach to something the author obviously considers a serious topic. For someone who has chosen to write on this topic, I find much of what he says here to be a serious misunderstanding. There is no "right" to petition to become a privateer. Congress simply has the power to confer that license upon individuals. Though the Third Amendment and this privateering clause both seem dated, it isn't inconceivable they could again be pertinent. I never thought the government would react the way it did to Covid-19, but most of those powers derive from relatively ancient practices that are affirmed in the common law - I mean, we have a restriction on search and seizure, and on government takings of property, but in a "public emergency" the government can burn down your house if it wanted to (as was done to part of Honolulu during a plague epidemic in 1900). Courts have also ruled that a building can be dynamited in an effort to prevent the spread of wildfire. No one now imagines such things possible, but it is because of these things that the Supreme Court has been hesitant to restrict the government's power, even in the face of evident overreach during Covid and the corresponding free speech cases that followed.
Whether or not some of the clauses in the Constitution are pertinent to modern life, I think the author's treatment of the subject rather shallow.
This is an entertaining approach to something the author obviously considers a serious topic. For someone who has chosen to write on this topic, I find much of what he says here to be a serious misunderstanding. There is no "right" to petition to become a privateer. Congress simply has the power to confer that license upon individuals. Though the Third Amendment and this privateering clause both seem dated, it isn't inconceivable they could again be pertinent. I never thought the government would react the way it did to Covid-19, but most of those powers derive from relatively ancient practices that are affirmed in the common law - I mean, we have a restriction on search and seizure, and on government takings of property, but in a "public emergency" the government can burn down your house if it wanted to (as was done to part of Honolulu during a plague epidemic in 1900). Courts have also ruled that a building can be dynamited in an effort to prevent the spread of wildfire. No one now imagines such things possible, but it is because of these things that the Supreme Court has been hesitant to restrict the government's power, even in the face of evident overreach during Covid and the corresponding free speech cases that followed.
Whether or not some of the clauses in the Constitution are pertinent to modern life, I think the author's treatment of the subject rather shallow.