Group Activity: Are You Smarter Than an Eighth-grade Civics Test
Photo by Kheel Center, CC BY 2.0
From The Washington Post:
Seeing a “civics education crisis,” the National Civics Bee aims to pump up nonpartisan enthusiasm for the topic with a contest for middle-schoolers, now in its third year.
“I’ve been doing civics basically my whole life,” said Emily Brubaker, 14, of Anchorage, this year’s winner, who has personally lobbied for legislation mandating insurance coverage for congenital disorders, including a dental condition she was born with.
The following questions are among those asked of 27 finalists who competed this month in the National Civics Bee, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce Foundation. The contest began with local and state competitions in 28 states, with some 6,000 competitors nationwide.
Test your knowledge to see if you know as much about government as these middle-schoolers.
Take the test here and discuss in the comments.
I’m surprised to see an acknowledgement of the answer to point 3 in the Washington Post. Denying this limitation of Congress’s authority has been at the heart of the Democratic agenda for the past 90 years.
I got 9/10, missing only the last one about “Common Sense.” This is definitely not a test an average 8th grader could pass.Report
I’m honestly curious: What are some examples of intra-state commerce that Democrats want to meddle with? I’m not close to informed, but all I could quickly find were objections to Obamacare being interference in interstate commerce.
I’m 8/10. I haven’t read Common Sense (though I should have guessed by the title). And I missed the flag burning case (I didn’t know the case, but I didn’t think the the dissenters would stoop to special casing the flag)Report
Federal minimum wage is an obvious one, but there are a ton of other federal regulations on strictly intrastate activity. I don’t object to a reasonably broad interpretation of “commerce between the states,” and think it should cover things that genuinely can’t be regulated at a state level, like air pollution and things related to interstate waters, but Wickard v. Fillburn had no legitimate Constitutional basis.
More generally, acknowledging that Congress has no legitimate powers other than those enumerated in Article I Section 8 or subsequent Amendments reminds us that Congress also doesn’t have the authority to do most of the spending it does. The legal basis for the entire federal welfare state rests on a disingenuous reading of the Taxing and Spending clause so obviously wrong that when anti-federalists warned that it would one day be interpreted as giving Congress the power to spend money on anything they deemed to promote the general welfare, James Madison called them bad-faith trolls and said it showed that they had no legitimate arguments to make against ratifying the Constitution.Report
Intra-state?
The big example is Raich v. Gonzales (nee Raich v. Ashcroft).
The argument made by Raich was “this is California weed grown with California seeds under California sunshine sprinkled with California water and it was *GIVEN*, not sold, and therefore it is not, in any way, shape, or form, ‘interstate commerce’ and, as such, should not be covered by Federal Law.”
The counter-argument was “but it has an *IMPACT* upon interstate commerce because if she wasn’t getting it from the Californians, she’d presumably be buying it and thus part of the global market and buying it from the global market would be interstate commerce therefore her California weed is under the umbrella of the Federal Government Law.”
“But that’s bipartisan as hell!”, you may say.
“Touche”, I respond (but only with one syllable so that it rhymes with “sploosh”).Report
10 out 10.Report