14 August, 2008

The Candidates and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment

This is the eighteenth post in an ongoing series regarding the major Presidential candidates and their views on civil liberties.

This post is about Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) and Senator Barack Obama's (D-IL) views pertaining to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I skipped the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as it deals with Presidential succession. I will also be skipping the Twenty-Seventh and most recent amendment as it deals with Congressional pay. Therefore, this will be the last of this series to deal with Constitutional Amendments for a while. I still have to return and do the Ninth and Tenth, but those will be handled at the end of the series (assuming I ever get there). After this I will turn my attention to other civil rights, such as abortion, small government, etc.

So, what's the Twenty-Sixth Amendment? It's one of the amendments which may enable Barack Obama to win this year's Presidential Election. Here's the text:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This standardizes the age for the right to vote to 18.

Unsurprisingly, neither Obama nor McCain have anything bad to say about it, or in fact, anything to say at all. Obama has certainly courted the youth vote, but there's nothing that I have seen that indicates that McCain wants to steal those votes away from him.

Grades: B's for both.

Twenty-Sixth Amendment: No Advantage.

I apologize for the brevity of the last few posts in this series, but there hasn't really been anything to say. Despite that, I wanted to give full coverage to each of the civil rights amendments. So, I felt it necessary to go ahead and make a "say nothing" entry. There will be much more to talk about in the upcoming posts in the series.

Results so far:

Obama McCain
First Amendment* F
D-
Second Amendment D- C-
Third Amendment B B
Fourth Amendment D+ D+
Fifth Amendment D+ B-
Sixth Amendment B B
Seventh Amendment C C
Eighth Amendment C B
Eleventh Amendment B+ B-
Thirteenth Amendment D+ B+
Fourteenth Amendment D+ C+
Fifteenth Amendment B B
Nineteenth Amendment B B
Twenty-First Amendment A- A-
Twenty-Third Amendment A- B
Twenty-Fourth Amendment B B
Twenty-Sixth Amendment B B

* Obama's First Amendment grade lowered as documented in this post.


UPDATE: Obama's First Amendment grade lowered to F as documented in this post.

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