Conscription

Con has claimed that conscription is unconstitutional because it violates a person's rights and that a volunteer powered army (as it is today) would be a sufficient, and constitutional army. However, I cited those supreme court cases and those lines from the Constitution to address that issue. What if the volunteer army is NOT sufficient to win a war? In the situtation where conscription would be used (a massive scale war, such as the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam), it is more likely than not that a volunteer powered army is simply not big enough or powerful enough to win at the end of the day. If this is the case, then NOT conscripting would openly violate the Constitutional rights of the government, as the government would NOT be able to protect the states from invasion, because it would NOT be able to raise and support an army and navy adequate to do the job. Here is a list of war-time powers given to the United States government historically. Almost all of these powers are unconsitutional in a time of peace, but the ultimate goal of the Constitution is to create and empower a government/nation-state, and the biggest threat to any nation state is revolution or invasion. As con has previously agreed, a time of war is the only time conscription would be called into effect, and in that scenario, it would absolutely be constitutional, as the fate of the nation is in danger. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com... As for taxing, I am also referring to the taxing and spending clause of the constitution. As you said, these are constitutionally given rights to the government, and therefore taxation is constitutional. The same stands for conscription, the government is responsible for 'raising an army/navy' and 'protecting the states from invasion', implicitly giving them the obligation to fund a military (whether or not people agree with their tax money being used that way), it also implicitly gives them the right, in a time of war, to conscript soldiers if there are not enough, and it implicitly gives them the right to protect the nation-state at all costs. Whether or not the thirteenth amendment mentions race is irrelevant, the amendment was designed vaguely for a reason - so that white Southerners could not find a legal loophole to continue slavery. Conscription, even though it was heavily employed by both the Union and the Confederacy, was never discussed in the making of this amendment. Furthermore, the slavery and forced servitude of blacks was happening in a time of peace. As a war time power, if conscription was truly unconstitutional, it should be specifically addressed and repealed in an amendment, law, or supreme court case. A good example of a war-time power that was retrospectively deemed un-constitutional was the internment of the Japanese in World War II. After the Japanese bombed pearl harbor, Japanese-Americans were taken out of their homes and jobs and locked up, even though they hadn't done anything. Had the Japanese Americans been openly revolting prior to their internment, I would not be surprised if Executive Order 9066 had been deemed Constitutional, but they hadn't done anything at all when the order was issued. On the contrary, Conscription has also been addressed in supreme court cases, and both times that it has, it has been upheld that it IS constitutional, and that denying the government the right to conscript prevents them from fulfilling their constitutional obligations.