February 12, 2016
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: Congress Should Decide Any Changes to Selective Service
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, you might have missed a controversy crop up about an issue that I imagine most Americans did not realize was controversial.
Over the last week, prominent military and political leaders have called for requiring all American women to register for the selective service – that is, potential military conscription.
To clarify: we are apparently now contemplating a future national emergency in which young women – as young as teenagers – are taken against their will, sent to boot camp and off to war… while eligible, able bodied young men are not.
As the father of a teenage daughter, as a husband and a brother and a Christian, I’m going to say this as politely as I can: this is completely unacceptable.
The United States has been blessed with millions of women who have served in our armed forces, since even before the founding of our nation. Today there are more such heroes than ever. They carry out their duty with distinction and honor us with their courage in every branch of our armed forces.
But voluntary service and the draft are entirely different things.
Advocates of adding women to the selective service say that the policy must be changed now because the Pentagon has opened combat jobs to women. Equal is equal, they say.
But equal is not interchangeable. Five thousand years of human civilization should be enough evidence to persuade us of this immutable fact. But if not, we also have reams of empirical data, including a massive study recently conducted by the Marine Corps.
But of course, the empirical case against conscripting women only points toward the moral case: men are supposed to protect women and children, not the other way around. Everyone in all three groups knows this, however unfashionable it may be to say in some places.
Being forced to register for the selective service is not a “right” women today are denied. It is a violent duty our daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives do not share.
Selective service is not a question of what our society allows women to do, but what our society forces women to do against their will. And civilized societies blessed with enough able-bodied men to meet their security needs do not conscript women – or for that matter girls, boys, the aged or infirm - to do it in their place. Period.
Obviously, I feel very strongly about this.
But there are honest differences of opinion on this issue, with respected voices on all sides. Some say the right policy now is to end selective service altogether. Some want to add women, but only as a contingency. Some say women might be drafted, but precluded from combat positions.
This is an unsettled debate. So it’s a decision that should be made by the American people’s elected representatives – not unelected bureaucrats or judges.
And so, when Congress returns from the upcoming President’s Day recess, I will introduce legislation to make sure that’s how this decision gets made. My bill does not change the requirements for selective service registration. It simply says that any future change can only come by an act of Congress.
I hope all my Senate colleagues, on both sides of the aisle and all sides of this question, join me. Because regardless of what decision we make, we should all be able to agree that it’s “we the people” who should make it.
Issue in Focus: Providing Equal Treatment to Home Educators
One of America’s most distinctive and exceptional qualities is the spirit of liberty embodied in our people and in our institutions. And there is perhaps no better expression of the American ethos of liberty than the belief that parents have the inalienable right – and indeed the responsibility – to direct the education of their children. Nowhere else in the world will you hear from parents what is widely held as a self-evident truth in households across America: that no one is in a better position to make decisions about a child’s education than his or her parents or guardians.
The premise of the homeschool movement in America is that parents do not forfeit this essential right to educate their own children just because they pay taxes to finance a public school system. It is also the reason liberty-minded policymakers have created various financial tools to ease the burden on parents using their own money to pay for their child’s educational expenses. For instance, Coverdell education savings accounts give parents the option to deposit up to $2000 annually of their pretax income into a special account that grows tax free and can be used to pay for qualified education expenses.
Coverdell accounts were created by the federal government, but they do not constitute a federal education “program” – they are a creature of the tax code. Participation is not mandatory, and it comes with no “strings attached.” It’s just one of many financial tools available to parents designed to preserve and protect their fundamental right to direct the education of their children. But there’s a problem: under the current system, Coverdell accounts aren’t available to all parents. Because of differences in state laws, homeschool parents have the option to sign up for a Coverdell account in only 14 states.
There are essentially two ways to fix this disparity between the states’ homeschooling families: either the states can act, which would require action by each of the 36 states where home educators are currently ineligible for Coverdell accounts, or Congress can amend the law’s eligibility requirements so that homeschool parents can access the savings provided by Coverdell accounts.
As we wait for the states to act, Congress should do what is within its power to ensure that federal law treats home educators fairly and equally, no matter what state they happen to live in.
That’s exactly the purpose of Section 201 of the “Enhancing Educational Opportunities for all Students Act,” which stipulates that, for the purposes of determining Coverdell account eligibility, the term “private school” includes “any home school that meets the requirements of State law applicable to such home schools.”
This is not, as some critics allege, a federal redefinition of home school. Nor does it change any state’s laws. It is a narrowly tailored amendment to federal law that resolves the unequal treatment of home educators under current law. Congress would be wise to pass the Enhancing Educational Opportunities for all Students Act at the earliest opportunity. Doing so would affirm the distinctively American idea that parents have a fundamental, God-given right to direct the education of their children.
