Once in a blue moon, bipartisanship produces productive and positive progress. For example, the First Step Act led people as diverse as Van Jones and Jim DeMint to put outside pressure on Congress and the White House to enact groundbreaking criminal justice reform.
But that’s not the norm. Most of the time, bipartisanship persists solely for spending your money on packages no one wants and regulating things everybody likes.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., have joined forces to raise the tobacco age, including for vaping products, to 21. McConnell, R-Ky., has formally introduced legislation to the Senate, indicating that he’s probably whipped enough votes to make this reality.
From a level of pure practicality, we can be sure that raising the tobacco age will ameliorate what McConnell calls the “youth vaping crisis” just as well as raising the drinking age did. And by that, I mean not well — as in, 64% of American high schoolers have already consumed alcohol, 90% of them via binge drinking.
The American drinking age is the second highest in the world, higher than that of North Korea and the same as that of Oman, a country governed by literal Sharia law. McConnell’s legislation would have us join Kuwait, Uganda, Honduras, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Samoa. Every other age restriction on Earth is lower.
Pointing out that a law would differ from the global median isn’t reason alone to oppose it, but in the case of the extraordinary failures of substance regulation in the United States, it’s a point worth making.
We can be fairly certain that teens will still get their hands on tobacco products just as easily as they do alcohol. The question then becomes what kind of tobacco will they consume. Will it be e-cigarettes, which serve a purpose in helping people stop smoking — a habit that kills half of its long-term users — and just 5% as harmful? Or will it be cigarettes, which 1.4 million teens have smoked in the past month?
Beyond practicality’s sake, the sheer notion of federal regulation of legal adults’ consumer power should incite bipartisan outrage. Consider that an 18-year-old can die for his country but can’t have a beer, and now the government wants to deny him a cigar to go with it. Sixteen-year-olds can operate two-ton war machines but are still considered children under the Affordable Care Act. The nation’s seeing a cultural crisis of adulthood, one where we expect an 18-year-old to take out a quarter million dollars in debt to go to college and then spend the next four years living in the equivalent of summer camp, complete with speech codes and RAs to act as nannies.
This is bad idea, and Americans on both sides of the aisle ought to be up in arms about it. McConnell shouldn’t be imposing more regulations on products for adults. He should be reducing the drinking age and ending the drug war instead.
