Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty(rafflaw), Guest Blogger
We have seen and heard on many occasions the Tea Party claim that it desires Congress and the Federal Government to follow the letter of the Constitution instead of reaching beyond the four corners of the document. With that thought in mind, I was intrigued by a recent article on the Think Progress site that reviewed the You Tube video claims made by U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, that Congress’ passage of laws outlawing and restricting Child Labor, was unconstitutional. http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/14/lee-child-labor/?wpmp_switcher=desktop
Now, I know that the Tea Party has sometimes gotten a bad reputation for making silly claims under the Tenth Amendment. Those claims actually spurred a new term or title, “Tenther”. But, I have to admit that Senator Lee has really gone way beyond the Tenther label with this false claim about the constitutionality of the child labor laws within the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Here is a link to a brief description of how the FLSA deals with child labor and the act itself: http://www.stopchildlabor.org/USchildlabor/fact1.htm & http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf
Senator Lee discusses his outrageous claim in a YouTube presentation that attempts to use the 1918 Supreme Court case of Hammer v. Dagenhart as his evidence that Congress has gone too far. Unfortunately for Senator Lee, the Hammer case was specifically overruled in 1941 by a unanimous Supreme Court in 1941 in U.S. v. Darby. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1183543472021488573&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr I guess Senator Lee didn’t want to let minor details get in the way of “proving” his claim. The part that I just don’t understand about Senator Lee is why does he want to return to the day when children were forced to work at too early of an age and under horrible conditions? From what I can tell from his video lectures which are found in the aforementioned Think Progress link, he claims that the State should be making those decisions and not the Federal Government or Judiciary. Why would he make those claims and not tell the listener that the case he is citing was overruled over 60 years ago? What other laws would be unconstitutional in his world?
Lawrence Rafferty, (rafflaw) Guest Blogger.
You also never addressed my other question. What other product or service could you offer for free and at the same time assume you had to force people to use?
Yes because advocating that schools shouldnt be funded and controlled by the government is really just me wanting to eradicate literacy. Also assuming literacy originates from public schooling is naive at best and ignores plenty of people who learned to read without it.
Noting the illiteracy rate at the time of the founding of this nation calls into question the basis of that foundation being supported by the will of the people when the majority, as you pointed out, would not have even known what they were agreeing to.
ekeyra,
Really, why should everyone be literate? Their parents should be able to keep them out of school if they don’t want them to attend. And who cares if the parents don’t have the time or inclination to actually teach the kids to read and write? Lots of people were illiterate at the founding of the country, so that’s good enough for us too! Right?
Good to see you’re encouraging ignorance.
James,
“I repeat: it’s compulsory education, not compulsory public education. If a parent can afford private school, or has time to home school, they are free to do so.”
With government approval. Free doesnt belong in that sentence. Ontop of that if they cannot afford the money for private school or the time to home school their child is kidnapped for 7 hours a day. I would say the majority of parents fall into this category. Also have you ever considered why the government would make schooling both free and mandatory? Is there any other product or service that could announce its cost as free and still have to force people to partake of it? Hasnt this contradictory notion ever occured to you?
“I’m open to reform, but you are never going to convince me that universal public education is a bad idea”
Good to see you putting your imperviousness to facts and reality on full display.
Copy that on the second paragraph, James.
I repeat: it’s compulsory education, not compulsory public education. If a parent can afford private school, or has time to home school, they are free to do so.
I’m open to reform, but you are never going to convince me that universal public education is a bad idea (and I hope other educated people feel the same).
James, you call forcing kids into a system of plummeting academic standards education? Also why would you assume kids need to be forced to socialize? Dont kids do this on their own anyway? All that happens when you cram kids together like a prison is a stratification of social classes, and harrasment to the point of suicide. What do you think has been going on?
An education? Socialization with their peers?
—
Also, it’s compulsory education, not compulsory public education.
You guys do realize child labor laws werent passed in the US until 1936? It wasnt about protecting children who were already phased out of the workforce, it was about adults who could vote deciding to use government violence to keep children from competing for their jobs. Besides that I know most of you will bitch and moan about child laborers but at least those kids get paid for their work. What do children who are forced to attend public schools recieve besides physical and psychological trauma on a daily basis?
Thomas Sowell
“THERE WAS A CERTAIN IRONY in a recent news story about the government cracking down on Sears because the department store chain was accused of having hired some workers who were not quite old enough to be working, according to the child labor laws.
Richard Sears, who founded the company, was younger than these workers when he began working. So was Aaron Montgomery Ward. An even younger worker was James Cash Penney, Jr., founder of the chain of stores bearing his name.
When J. C. Penney was an eight-year-old boy growing up on a family farm, his father told him that he was now old enough to buy his own clothes. Moreover, neither his parents nor his older siblings would tell him how to get the money. He had to figure that out for himself, as the older children had had to do before him. With a hole in his shoe, he had a special incentive to go find some work to do.
These department store magnates were not unique in starting to work at an early age. John Jacob Astor, who would eventually become the richest man in America, left home and began working at lowly jobs as a teenager. So did future Wall Street financier Jay Gould, future steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, future oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, future founder of the American automobile industry Henry Ford and future radio pioneer David Sarnoff, who created RCA and NBC.
What if our wonderfully compassionate and ever zealous social crusaders had been around then and had managed to put a stop to this child labor? Would these energetic young fellows have been diverted into midnight basketball or perhaps gone into the underground economy and possibly crime?
If they had ended up in jail or on welfare or on drugs, the social crusaders would undoubtedly have come to their rescue with half-way houses or other programs that would have made them wards of the state. Meanwhile, the social crusaders would feel good about themselves because of all the benefits they were showering on the less fortunate with the taxpayers’ money.
Do-gooders are not the only people with a vested interest in restrictive child labor laws. Labor unions have always supported and promoted laws that keep young people out of the work force, where they would otherwise compete for jobs with the unions’ own members. Since these young people have to be warehoused someplace while they are kept idle, unions have also been big supporters of compulsory attendance laws that keep teenagers in school, even when they are learning nothing except irresponsibility and self-indulgent mischief-making.
The education establishment itself has of course been all in favor of keeping teenagers in school long past the point where it is accomplishing nothing, except providing jobs for teachers and administrators. Those jobs are not a small thing, as far as the National Education Association is concerned. And the NEA, with its millions of dollars in campaign contributions, is no small thing as far as the politicians are concerned.
At one time, child labor laws were used to stop youngsters whose ages had not yet reached double digits from working in exhausting and dangerous factories and mines. Today, they are used to keep big healthy teenagers from handling pieces of paper in air-conditioned offices.
Education is of course important. But, like many other things that are important, how much of it makes sense varies from person to person, as well as according to circumstances. Not everyone should continue on to get a Ph.D. and then receive a post-doctoral fellowship.
The point along the way at which it makes sense to stop cannot be determined by simply saying that education is a Good Thing or by calling people “drop-outs” when they decide that they have had enough before third parties want to turn them loose. Much of what is called education is glorified baby-sitting, producing little more than artificially extended adolescence.
The stringency of today’s compulsory attendance laws and child labor laws prevents many young people from getting the kind of maturity that can only be found in work and in personal responsibility. If nothing else, many teenagers need to get out of their adolescent subculture and into an environment where they can draw upon the experience of adults around them, instead of absorbing the fads of similarly immature peers.”
Jill,
“Of course the Tea Party would like to make the US just like much of the rest of the world is now–full of child labor and appalling working conditions for everyone at the bottom.”
How do you go from efforts to enforce restraints built into the Constitution, to claiming that the Tea Party supports child labor?
What a completely ignorant accusation!
Of course the Tea Party would like to make the US just like much of the rest of the world is now–full of child labor and appalling working conditions for everyone at the bottom.
Rafflaw, you are a great person but I don’t think you understand the destruction of labor rights is the work of a well entrenched oligarchy that, in the US, works with two parties, D and R on behalf of global corporations. You get caught up in propaganda, “oh those evil tea partiers”, while you miss the giant party consisting of the upper 1 percent global elites. You must see through there policy of divide and conquer. The Tea Party is your enemy but so is most of the rest of the corporate state and corporatist work with Democrats and anyone who will serve them.
Not long ago one of the libertarians asked why I “don’t like” libertarians. Lee’s statement and the tortured logic behind it a re good example of why a pseudo-philosophy like this is worthy of dislike. And posing it as a question of disliking people is an example of the tactics that make the legitimacy of libertarianism so transparently questionable.
Tom H:
“. . . but the fact remains that the New Deal Court had to significantly reinvent the scope of Article I to justify federal involvement, disregarding ordinary rules of statutory construction in the process. . .”
And thank God they did! The results of their behavior lead to 50 years of growth and stability in the American markets and economy. The world of 1930 was very different from the world of 1770 and the rules, requirements, dangers and opportunities required thinking beyond the plantation and shopkeeper world of colonial America.
People who fetishize the words of the Constitution to mean exactly what _they_ think they meant when they were written ignore the reality of a changing world. Radio and TV would not have been given the protection of the press, the right to bear arms would only cover muzzle-loader black powder guns.
But “tenthers” and many of the other “teenthers” (13, 14, 16 and 17 at least are actively under attack from from certain quarters)are even worse. They want these amendments interpreted the way that suits them & not the way the legislative and judicial branch have understood them for years. Its almost as if they are intent on returning to the plantation and shopkeeper world.
The masters of the universe have devalued labor pretty well and are running out of ways to devalue it some more. Because of education and class structure there are still limits to what can be done with “off-shoring”. I’m sure many of our masters would love to be able to employ children because it would be so much cheaper.
But of course not all states would allow it – at least not right away. You can probably name the ones that would be first in line. But as we see with wages & taxes the race to the bottom is on once the barrier is broken in one state. Other states ‘pro-business’ politicians will say “our state has to allow child labor to be able to complete”. Oh sure some decent politicians will try to put in requirements and protections but that won’t really matter in the long run.
An old IWW poem:
The golf links lie so near the mills
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
To see the men at play.
*”may NOT like the Tenth”
(I also add that I would be okay with the pejorative use of the term “Eighteenth-ers” . . . )
The term “Tenther” is cute as far as ad hominems go. What’s next? “First-ers” for people who advocate free speech and separation of church and state? (“Pay no attention to that Floyd Abrams character; just another crazy First-er!”) How about “Fourteenth-ers” for people who advocate equal rights for ethnic minorities and women? And perhaps “Fourth-ers” for those annoying folks over at the ACLU? Due Process-ers? Ex Post Facto-lites? Women’s Suffrageans!
I think we all support child labor laws as a policy matter, but the fact remains that the New Deal Court had to significantly reinvent the scope of Article I to justify federal involvement, disregarding ordinary rules of statutory construction in the process, and transforming the Tenth Amendment into a virtual nullity. You may like the Tenth Amendment, but championing the clauses you like while making cute pejoratives out of those you disfavor isn’t particularly enlightening.
The Tenth Amendment was a powerful structural limitation on the federal government — a reminder that a central government powerful enough to give everything what we want is equally capable of taking it away. Today, that structural protection is effectively gone. That’s regrettable.
This was a disappointing guest post on a blog that is usually quite rigorous.
The stupidity, the ignorance … I’m reaching a tipping point …
Lotta makes a great deal of sense when it comes to the possible motivation behind these ridiculous statements but what sort of fool agrees to be the idiot spokesman? And what is wrong with the citizens of Utah if they vote to return this guy to the Senate?
It’s late and I am wasted by too many hours of football (though both my teams won)so my willingness to try and discuss this latest insult to our collective intelligence rationally is almost non-existent.
I’d best stop now before I say something I won’t regret but will be so damn nasty that I will have no choice but to walk it back a bit.