Nobody argues about the Third Amendment. Quartering troops in private homes is not a live issue, it has reached a court essentially once, and Bill Norton says the reason it is not a problem is precisely that the amendment exists. When he got to it while writing the book, his first thought was that there was nothing to say about it.
Then he read it carefully. The Third Amendment does not ban quartering. It bans quartering in peacetime without the owner's consent, and in time of conflict it requires that quartering be done according to law. Two conditions, and both of them are about consent.
That second one is the discovery. If the government can quarter troops in an emergency because a law says so, is that still consent? Norton says yes, and calls it pre-consent. A law passed in advance, debated in public, voted by your representatives, is the people consenting ahead of time to what may be done in a situation where there is no time to ask. Samuel Adams made the same point directly: if the laws are already passed, follow them, and do not ignore them because an emergency arrived.
Which is where 2020 comes in. Norton's home state of Arizona had already worked this out. The state constitution has an emergencies section and a separate section for conflict emergencies, and a pandemic sits in the general emergencies section, where the governor gets extra authority over government departments but no authority to tell businesses or individuals what they can and cannot do.
Norton took the governor's declarations at face value until the fourth or fifth one, then went and read the constitution himself, and found that the sections being cited were the wrong ones. He says he has never heard anyone else raise it. Not a politician, not a radio host, nobody. And the laws Arizona had passed years earlier, after other public health emergencies, the pre-consent the people had already given, were thrown out and treated as though they did not exist.
He gives Arizona credit for getting out of it faster than states that ran a year and a half of lockdowns and closed schools. But he describes walking around in that first stretch with real anxiety, watching businesses shuttered and people masked, knowing that laws already on the books were being ignored, and using the founders' own phrase for it. He was trembling for the nation.
If you want your representatives reminded that the laws they already passed are supposed to bind them too, the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.
Get the full four-lesson training at teapartypatriots.org/1776. Watch the full conversation at jennybethshow.com.
00:00 — Does the Third Amendment Still Matter
00:21 — The One Time It Reached a Court
01:02 — The Principle Hidden in a Boring Amendment
01:34 — Consent Has to Always Exist
01:50 — Law Is the People's Pre-Consent
02:42 — Samuel Adams on the Laws Already on the Books
03:00 — The Modern Example: Pandemic Lockdowns
03:32 — The Governor Quoted the Wrong Sections
04:22 — What Emergency Powers Actually Allow
04:39 — Nobody Checked the Citation
05:08 — The Pre-Consent Laws That Were Ignored
05:53 — Trembling for the Nation
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