Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, November 07, 2008 4:54:44 PM
Intriguing. Will that be in lieu of or in addition to the three months of compulsory civil defense training Rahm Emanuel wants 18-to-25-year-olds to do?
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve
in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will
expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and
will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved
schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and
Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve
America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service
in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in
college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by
improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the
same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.
Presumably, the penalty for being a 20-year-old who doesn’t want to
spend two hours a week picking up trash would be not graduating. The
penalty for dodging Emanuel’s program, only Rahm knows. I remember this
subject coming up now and again in poli sci classes and my leftish
professor arguing that a peacetime draft would violate the right of
privacy sketched out in cases like Roe as an infringement of one’s
physical autonomy. If The One pushes ahead with this, it’ll be fun
watching conservatives suddenly trying to coopt that right and liberals
just as suddenly trying to narrow it. (On which side, do you suppose,
will the ACLU come down?) Alternatively, you could skip the right of
privacy and try a First Amendment argument: If the state can’t compel
students to say the pledge of allegiance, arguably it can’t make them
go clean parks, either. That case would turn on the distinction between
speech and conduct; given the current composition of the Court,
refuseniks would stand at least a shot of winning.
It bears noting that Maverick’s also always been famously gung ho
for kids doing some form of national service — “There should be more
focus on meeting national goals and on making short-term service, both
civilian and military, a rite of passage for young Americans,” he wrote
in the Washington Monthly(!) in 2001 — but he’s been careful, at least lately, to say that it should be volunteer-only.
Exit question: Won’t a lot of conservatives, especially older ones, dig
this idea? Keeps kids busy and out of trouble, teaches spoiled teens
responsibility, etc.