The Fourth Amendment is Dead. Now Let's Kill The Thirteenth!

The state of Mississippi has been the butt of jokes this week, after discovering that, due to a clerical error, it never did get around to ratifying the constitution's 13th amendment, which abolished slavery. But don't be too hard on Mississippi; the US House of Representatives thinks the 13th amendment is silly anyway. Behold House Resolution 748, a proposal "To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or as civilian service in a Federal, State, or local government program or with a community-based agency or community-based entity."

The US constitution is now equivalent to the constitution of the old Soviet Union: on paper it promised many pretty freedoms, but only a suicidal fool would behave as though those freedoms actually applied. Here in the US, we barely even bother paying lip service to the notion of being a free country anymore, so why not mandate seven years of forced labor for everybody? (At least everybody too young and poor to possess the legal resources necessary to fight it.) We can raise American children to believe it's a milestone on their road to adulthood, like getting their first driver's license, or first strip-search at the hands of the TSA.