The America Serves section of President-elect Obama’s new transition web site, Change.gov, suggests a large expansion in national service. Conservative and civil-liberties bloggers think he’s calling for a non-military draft for young adults: They envision the Obama Youth marching off to do The One’s bidding.
“America Serves” starts with an Obama quote defining the American Dream as serving your nation, community or neighborhood.
“When you choose to serve — whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood — you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.”
We are all community organizers now.
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.
That’s a lot of corpses — why not just expand AmeriCorps? — but it seems to be voluntary. However, students may not have a choice.
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.
He’s going to require children and young adults to accept the call? I think someone did too much summarizing when taking proposals from the Obama/Biden campaign site. That called for public service to be both “universal” and “voluntary” — quite the oxymoron — with a $4,000 tax credit for 100 or more hours per year. The government would “encourage” schools to develop “service learning” programs in middle and high school. Presumably, the feds would pay the cost: Someone’s got to keep track of the hours, nag the non-completers and develop and teach a curriculum to turn involuntary service into “learning.” (In my years of real volunteering, I’ve seen a lot of kids show up to fill school requirements. It’s easy to tell them from voluntary volunteers.)
Radley Balko wonders what kind of service would prove credit-worthy.
Something tells me that you’d be more likely to get one of Obama’s vouchers by going door to door for one of ACORN’s living wage campaigns than, say, volunteering for a libertarian nonprofit organization that advocates against things like government-mandated community service.
Eugene Volokh raises another point: If national servants are assigned real jobs, what about the people doing that work now?
If, for instance, college students help out in schools, I take it there’d be fewer jobs for teacher’s aides. Moreover, the loss of such possible union jobs will be roughly proportional to the public value that the community servants will provide: If the college students require more supervision than they provide value, that might mean more union jobs, but it will also mean that they won’t do much good to the institution they’re supposedly serving.
Untrained youths usually don’t provide much value; training short-timers costs a lot of money. Unions will demand that “volunteers” don’t infringe on unionized workers’ jobs. That suggests the national servants will be assigned marginal and menial tasks.
Update: The “America Serves” section of the Change.gov site has been changed: “Required” is out. Service for students is now a “goal.”
BizzyBlog points out that a $4,000 credit for 100 hours of service is $40 an hour. That certainly would motivate Americans to enroll in a low-cost community college for at least a semester. Even full-time workers could enroll: Surely, it would be unfair to discriminate against people who can’t afford to attend classes full-time or don’t pass all their classes or already have a degree.
> Thor forfend that Americans should be asked to do something to help their country, even strongly encourage to do community service!
I note that my questions about the definition of “community service” has not been answered by its advocates. I’ll repeat it.
What counts as community service?
In some of the more enlightened parts of the US, the Boy Scouts are considered “unclean”. Will working with them be considered “community service”? How about registering Repubs? How about advocating for “shall issue” CCW or teaching gun safety (with actual guns)?
We know why they’re not answering – they know that an honest answer will reveal that their “community service” is an attempt to pre-empt activities that they don’t like and to push their social agenda.
> Did Roosevelt’s programs turn us into a Communist country?
They did make the Great Depression “Great” by lengthening it by a about 7 years.
It’s unclear why this is seen as a good thing.
MTHeads,
Since your comment was not focused on evaluating the merits or lack thereof of the proposal I was making the simple guess that you might have a philosophical disagreement with it. I’m guessing from your second post that my initial guess was wrong.
pm
Sorry, I misread your post. I don’t like to wear my reading glasses. I thought you wrote “public endeavor”. Not too bright of me. But I am certainly not against public education. I do think our school system is stuck in the past and needs a complete overhaul. But I only want it up-dated, not eliminated.
Whole lot of specifics being debated on something that hasn’t even been written yet.
Perhaps some of those who believe that any such construction is a constitutional violation could point to some legal challenges that have derived from existing community service/high school graduation requirements (although I don’t even know that any specifics regarding whether this would apply to high school students OR graduation have been contemplated to date).
Margo –
There are two differings standards for Constitutional violations. For the states and municipalities, only those provisions of the Constitution that the court has held to be incorporated against the states apply, e.g. the First Amendment applies while Article I does not. As far as I know, there have been no successful challenges to a municipal or state program on those grounds.
For the Federal Government, any action must pass *all* restrictions in the Constitution as well as being included in one of the powers explicitly granted to the Federal Government. My argument for Obama’s proposal being unconstitutional as stated is that it would fail a 13th Amendment challenge because it is a conscription of labor that does not follow from an explicitly-stated responsibility of government, as the draft and jury service do. Only the Federal Government needs to draw its powers from language in the US Constitution, since states and municipalities draw their powers from their own constitutions/chartes.
I hope this helps clarify that a valid Constitutional challenge exists.
Quincy:
I hope you are not saying that (you believe that) involuntary servitude does not apply to actions of states and municipalities.
“Only the Federal Government needs to draw its powers from language in the US Constitution,”
Correct.
“…since states and municipalities draw their powers from their own constitutions/chartes.”
Incorrect in part. Local governments have the powers granted them in their organic documents and in state statute, so that is correct. However, state constitutions are not GRANTS of power like either the federal constitution or a city charter: they are limitations on INHERENT power, the unlimited sovereignty that the states, alone, inherited from Parliament upon independence. The federal government, and local governments, may only do that which they are authorized to do: the states, by contrast, may do anything that they are not forbidden to do, whether their own state constitutions or by valid federal law (the federal constitution, federal statute, a treaty, or federal administrative regulation).
Margo –
The 13th Amendment has been incorporated against the states for other things, but not this. I’m saying the Federal Government has a greater limitation placed upon it in by the US Constitution than the states do since the Federal Government is only granted specific powers by the US Constitution.
So, if this does get struck down on Constitutional grounds, the ruling might impact state and local programs depending on the reasoning Supreme Court used. If it reasons that the Federal Government cannot do this because of there is no enumerated power for it, the states may still enact an identical program. If the court reasons that the program is a violation of students’ 13th Amendment rights, then the states and municipalities would also be considered to violate the students’ rights if they enacted such a program, and hence would be barred from doing so by the ruling. (If not barred, at least it would provoke another valid challenge.)
So I’m not saying that I believe this, I’m saying that’s the lay of the land in terms of the law. My personal belief is that, where school attendance is compulsory, any service requirement imposed by a state or municipality is a violation of the 13th Amendment and therefore unconstitutional. I’m also the type who tends to believe very little in exceptions to constitutional limits on power, again putting me at odds with the current legal worldview.
Dave -
You’re quite right, I spoke inaccurately, and misspelled charters while I was at it. I’m 2-for-2!
“The 13th Amendment has been incorporated against the states for other things, but not this.”
The 13th Amendment doesn’t need to be incorporated against the states through the 14th. It’s not like the original Bill of Rights that were recognized as only limiting federal power before 1868: it’s simply a blanket prohibition, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States…” It applies to the states by its own terms.
pm said, “I took the change to the website to mean that Obama and team had decided against obligatory service.”
If we were truly the country that the Constitution says we are, this issue is none of Obama’s and the federal government’s business. There is nothing in the Constitution which suggests that the federal government should be involved in any way with education. But, we’ve been ignoring the Constitution for so long, it is the default position that the federal government is supposed to be involved in everything. In reality, it should be involved in very little of our everday life.
Soon, the federal government will be taking over even more of our lives. Then, every day will be just like the definition of socialism: Socialism is like spending every day in line at the DMV. My poor children. Poor us.
Allen (Nov. 08, 10:00 am post)
http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDAwZWM4OTRmYzRkYTZhMGY2MmRhNTM2MWI5OTJkNTM=
Ah, and so it begins. In the next 4-8 years it’s going to suck to be 18-25 years old. Either you follow the Obama administration’s federal mandates, or you don’t get your high school diploma and/or go to college!
Since the U.S. government is in the process of taking over (bailing out) the mortgage, insurance, investment, automobile, and airline industries anyway, maybe some of that “Community Service” will end up being working for those taken over (bailed out) companies for free.
“The federal government has decided that you will work for GM for free for six months. If you refuse, you can be barred from attending a college in the United States, or spend up to six months in jail, depending on the nature of the refusal.” (i.e., just quietly protesting against it vs. going to the local news station to make a news story out of it) “This is your required duty to be an American citizen.”
Great, where do I sign up? Oh, wait… they already signed it for me.