It’s neither a morally good nor a morally evil position, just a pragmatic one.
I think that, similar to the Second Amendment existing but a whole lot of gun restrictions being considered constitutional anyway, the Supreme Court simply implements a lot of leeway in the name of “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” as said by Justice Robert Jackson. There are and always have been things about the Constitution that are un-constitutional but SCOTUS permits because it’s simply what practicality demands.
Or, it could simply be a matter of not having been sufficiently challenged yet, and maybe the right argument would do the trick but hasn’t happened.
Phrasing something as a “moral necessity” isn’t usually a way of framing it as anything other than a moral good, and an obligatory one at that.
Or it fits the justices’ world view. It would be a very gutsy move to declare the draft unconstitutional. Given the long history of the draft in this country, I would not expect any SCOTUS decision holding in unconstitutional. Still, that does not mean the draft is ever justified. Just that the Supreme Court won’t step in
Cowardice in the face of the enemy (failing to engage)— subject to execution, when they were still handing out such sentences.
I.E. you’d better just refuse to pick up a rifle in the first place, like the guy in Hacksaw Ridge.
Middle class may not equal rich
Except that they may very likely be put into a situation where if they don’t kill the enemy, the enemy will indeed kill them. In that sense, the draftees would indeed have been forced to kill someone.
True, but I’ve know plenty of rich draftees, as well as rich reservists - my first battalion CO as a reservist had a medtech startup with a $130 million IPO in the late 1990s, so he was probably worth a lot, but he was still humping the hills with the rest of us.
But that’s just anecdotal. I’ve looked online, and while I couldn’t find anything in English, I did find this article from respected Israeli economic paper Kalkalist from 2023:
If you’ll scroll down to the second graph, below the pie chart, you’ll see enlistment rates based on socioeconomic background. The Y axis is the enlistment ratel the X axis being their percentile group (10 being the top 10%, 9 being the top 11%-20%, and so on). As you can see, the top 40% all have equally high enlistment rates, higher than the rest of the population. In addition, its says below that the top 40% also contribute 59% of the soldiers serving in combat arms professions. That means that the people in the front lines are more likely than not to be middle class and richer.
In short, rich draft dodgers is not an Israeli phenomenon.
Thanks for this! Very interesting
But no one has been threatened with execution fort being a lousy target shooter. At least not in Western armies
Re: whether draft is constitutional under 13th. Just adding more context.
Right, Not on its face. A lot of handwaving. As you note, they had to create/made up a civic duty exception. So draft, jury duty, being compelled as a witness, are all forms of involuntary servitude that is allowed even though the 13th on its face bans that stuff.
For the draft though, there is additional support. The constitution gives Congress the power to “raise armies.” Read together with 13th, logic says it would be limited to volunteer armies, but it’s not due to civic duty exception.
If we ever do a future draft, it has to be approved by Congress first. Still involuntary servitude, but it does go through the democratic process.
I always got a kick out of the Third Amendment: “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.”
There, it’s like they explicitly taketh away while they giveth: you have this right Unless Congress Says Otherwise. The idea that the explicit bar on involuntary servitude has an implied ‘Unless Congress Says Otherwise’ is just — par for the course, I guess?
It does not. It has an exception created via SC case law. The exception just means it’s not unconstitutional. It’s common for the SC to create exceptions to the written text. They are the arbiters of what the constitution means. Congress did not create the exception.
Since the draft is not banned by 13th, Congress decides whether and when to implement the draft. They get that right (as opposed to say the President) via Article 1 of constitution (power to raise armies) and statute.
All I was getting at was that since the decision on whether to implement the draft is done by our elected Congress, and not the President / unelected official or military brass/ etc, it feels less like involuntary servitude. It obviously still is, though.
late: that might be what you were getting. I wasn’t certain. Unlike the the 3rd though, it’s not all built into the text of the same amendment. It’s separate and distinct from the 13th. It very well could be that the draft is not unconstitutional via 13th but a general decides when to do it (via somewhere else). Just happens to be Congress in this case.
Just like prison labor. It’s not that involuntary servitude is actually against the law, it’s that you need government authorization for your slaves. And of course the government can authorize it for itself.
Some of this thread hinges on what people think of the nation-state and whether people have a duty to the government of the day in a system that may not be very democratic and to which they may belong by accident of birth. That’s a lot to unpack. It gets harder if we consider that much of what is called nationalism or patriotism is based on an appeal to emotions and to early training rather than logic, examined self-interest, or critical analysis.
Kinda. Prison labor is forced work. But it’s explicitly allowed by the constitution (it’s not borne out later via a case law exception). But right, it is involuntary servitude that is allowed.
Neither prison labor, or the draft, any any kind of involuntary servitude (forced work) is slavery. Slavery is treating people like property. You do what you want with your property. Whether they are forced to work or not has no bearing on whether they are enslaved. There are no exceptions to slavery.
Little or nothing has been said in this thread about the long-standing practice of allowing conscientious objectors to serve in the military without being faced with potentially killing someone. They’ve rendered other service, sometimes heroically.
There’s an argument about the morality of relying entirely on a volunteer military where people enlist to have a job with decent benefits and potential for paid education (and/or for patriotic reasons), as opposed to drafting whoever qualifies on the basis of age and physical capability, regardless of income or college/grad school enrollment.
No, that’s only a specific type of slavery; plenty of forms of slavery have limited what the master could do to the slaves. That didn’t make it not slavery, however. It just means that even for slavers, the American South was exceptionally awful.
I think you’re misreading the amendment.
It has two clauses: the first, about quartering in time of peace, which is specifically banned, the second, about quartering in time of war, which cannot be done save in a manner provided for legally. In a way, it’s another element of the thread’s debate: what, if anything, does a state of war justify that allows for at least temporary restraints on our accepted constitutional freedoms in order that the nation may survive?
I read it as saying that, in times of war, the government can do it by law; but, since it can’t be done in time of peace, Congress — which can declare war — has to declare war before doing it by law.
I’d like to think that stripping away, say, First Amendment rights would involve more than ‘meh, just get barely enough votes to do it by law.’ But: if they really want to quarter those soldiers, and they can get enough votes to quarter those soldiers by law in time of war, then: how many votes are required to add a quick “oh, and that’s happening now, see?”