Musings on Health Care and the Third Amendment

Congress has done it. They couldn't go through the gate. They couldn't make it over the fence. They tried to pole vault, but the pole wasn't long enough. They parachuted, but got caught up in the trees. So they dug. They dug deep. They found a way to dig a tunnel through the muck and the mud of Washington politics. And so it has come to pass that the Senate's Health Care has been passed by the House, and it has been amended through the reconciliation process.

I was reading through the Bill of Rights the other day, and came across what may be the Amendment that has the least affect on our daily lives today - the Third Amendment. It reads, "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."

We really don't think about this amendment anymore - I mean, come on, the idea of having soldiers quartered in our homes at any time, let alone in a time of peace, seems almost laughable. But why was this so important to the founders? I suspect that it had to do with stuff. Our stuff. And the right to do with our stuff what we please. We didn't want to have to put soldiers up in our homes because, well, they were ours, and it wasn't right for the government to tell us what to do with it. Now, I am not trying to argue that the Third Amendment prohibits the new Health Insurance Mandate, certainly not in a legal sense. But is this really any more of a stretch than finding a right to "privacy" in the amendment, as was done in the famous Griswald case.

I guess that what I am saying is exactly what Justice Louis Brandeis stated in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States back in 1928. We have the "right to be left alone." Well, maybe we used to.