A Republican Congress Should Make Obama Lower the Drinking Age

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has
suggested six bills a Republican-controlled Congress should
send to President Obama’s desk. He’s likely to veto many of them,
but one bill that would stand a strong chance of survival would be
a repeal of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act.

It’s not an issue that generates a lot of attention, and neither
Obama nor Republican Congressional leaders have talked about it.
That’s a mistake. The current policy is an unqualified failure that
has contributed to reckless, binge-drinking culture on college
campuses, Reynolds writes:

The limit was dreamed up in the 1980s as a bit of political
posturing by then-secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole. It
has been a disaster. College drinking hasn’t been reduced; it has
just moved out of bars and into dorm rooms, fraternities/sororities
and house parties. The result has been a boom in alcohol problems
on campus.

I include the sexual assault crisis on college campuses among
those problems and have argued that lowering the drinking age is
one way—perhaps
the best way—to actually reduce rape. Instead of forcing
colleges to expel incapacitated students for
failing to properly interrogate each other during each and
every moment of sexual interaction, lets abolish the policy that
puts students in danger in the first place.

Certain legislating moralizers will likely complain that
repealing the drinking age is akin to giving teens permission to
drink. To them I would point out the obvious: Teens are
already drinking (in unimaginable excess), and because the
police can arrest them for it, they do their drinking as far away
from public scrutiny as possible—in the very places where they are
most likely to be in danger (i.e. stranger’s basements). Other
students who are willing and able to break the law and avoid the
cops become the gatekeepers to teen drinking, rather than the local
bartender. Which sounds preferable?

See the Instapundit’s full list of suggestions
here.