OPINION:
Earlier this year, South Dakota’s legislature ratified the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the federal government, states and localities from denying 18-year-old citizens the right to vote. Why the state waited so long to give its approval to an amendment that’s been in effect since 1971 is a mystery, especially in view of the measure’s controversial history. In retrospect, the amendment ranks with the 18th, or the Prohibition amendment, as a national embarrassment because it was conceived in haste and duress, and has complicated enormously the standing of young people in a democratic society.
The amendment followed on the heels of a Supreme Court decision (Oregon v. Mitchell) in 1970 that struck down a congressional law mandating voting rights for 18-year-olds in all elections, with the court indicating that Congress had no authority over local and state balloting. No amendment was ratified so quickly as the 26th. Unanimously adopted by the Senate on March 10, 1971, and by a vote of 401-19 in the House on March 23, the amendment became effective a mere 107 days later. Five states — Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Tennessee and Washington — gave approval on the same day the House sent it to the states.
That the amendment, about which there was congressional debate as far back as World War II, has been a national embarrassment is evidenced by the fact that only one book and a single doctoral dissertation have studied it. In other words, liberals who pushed the amendment through Congress and the states have really nothing to be proud of in terms of the amendment’s 43-year origin and history: 18- to 20-year-olds don’t regularly exercise their vote; they are increasingly uninformed about current political events, as illustrated by tests and polls; and here’s the worst part: They never really campaigned for the balloting option in 1971.
As the author of the single doctoral dissertation, Jenny Diamond Cheng (University of Michigan, 2008), makes clear: Young people demonstrated in the late 1960s because they wanted the Vietnam War to end, a goal that couldn’t be delivered by Congress. “Unlike other suffrage campaigns,” writes Ms. Cheng, “the charge for eighteen-year-old voting was largely led by legislators rather than by potential enfranchisees.” In point of fact, the drive “took on real momentum only when members of Congress began to believe that giving rights to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds would help to restore order, soothe dissent, and preserve the authority of existing political institutions.”
As for the argument advanced by many members of Congress that if one was old enough to fight in wars, then one was old enough to vote, a few shrewd, experienced legislators like then-Rep. Emanuel Celler, New York Democrat, tore it apart as early as 1954:
“Voting is as different from fighting as chalk is from cheese. When the draft age was lowered from 21 to 18 years of age, the generals told us that this was a necessary move because young men under 21 were more easily molded into good soldiers than were their elders who had grown to maturity. Young men under 21 are more pliable and more amenable to indoctrination. Instant and unquestioning obedience may be most desirable from soldiers in the battlefield, but in a voter such obedience would be most undesirable. Self-interested groups and corrupt politicians would find such obedience a fertile playground.”
The legal implication in ratifying the 26th Amendment was that 18-year-olds were henceforth to be considered as adults. Nearly all states followed suit, lowering the age when individuals reach their majority or adulthood to 18. However, Congress in 1984 paid no heed to this age transformation, passing the National Minimum Drinking Act to combat drunken driving that forced states to raise the legal age to 21 for purchase and public possession of alcoholic beverages. If states didn’t comply, a portion of their federal highway funds would be cut off. To be sure, states followed this backslide to adolescence, with a couple — Georgia and Wisconsin — providing a baby-sitting loophole, to wit, the possession-of-booze restriction could be lifted if parents or legal guardians were present.
Following suit, Obamacare in 2009 stipulated that individuals under the age of 26 are eligible for health insurance under their parents’ policies — a dependent-age stretch that defies reason. As for the Centers for Disease Control, the murkiness continues, with a recent birthrate report issued that lumps 15- to 19-year olds as “teens.” Some localities and states have enacted measures preventing under-21-year-olds from purchasing tobacco products.
Still, the worst result of the 26th Amendment has been its effect on young people slightly below the age of 18. For prosecutors and judges have too often treated 16- and 17-year-old defendants — and even some younger ones — as adults rather than juveniles. In sum, because these youngsters are just a tad below the legal yardstick of 18, adulthood becomes even more reachable in the harsh eyes of the law, a situation unlikely to have developed if the standard of 21 years were in place.
Of all the embarrassing aspects over the years of the arguments for voting rights for 18-year-olds, none comes closest to that advanced in 1943 by Rep. Estes Kefauver, Tennessee Democrat, who went on to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in 1956:
“Isn’t the strongest argument that boys and girls ordinarily finish high school when about 18 years of age and at that time civics, political science and matters of responsibility in government are very much on their minds, and if they don’t exercise these responsibilities immediately, in the three years they may lose interest?”
Thomas V. DiBacco is professor emeritus at American University.
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