Conservative Senator Says Obama’s Plan to Expand AmeriCorps Is Unwarranted Federal Intrusion

Ryan Byrnes
CNS News
Thursday, March 26, 2009

The U.S. Senate is poised to approve a dramatic expansion of the AmeriCorps national community service program. Conservatives who oppose the measure say it is an attempt to greatly expand government’s role in providing community services by replacing charitable volunteers with paid government workers.
 
Senators voted 74-14 Monday to take up the Serve America Act, legislation that would more than triple the size of the AmeriCorps program over the next eight years, expanding its current 75,000 positions to 250,000.
 
Last week, a similar bill that would add 175,000 participants to the program passed in the House by a vote of 321-105.
 
President Barack Obama said at the time that expanding AmeriCorps is ”timely.”

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“At this moment of economic crisis, when so many people are in need of help and so much needs to be done, this could not be more urgent,” Obama said. “It is up to every one of us to do his or her small part to make the world a better place.”
 
But conservatives such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C) call the expansion nothing more than “the federal government reaching further into the world of civil society” — an arena they say is best left to the local level and to organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, United Way and Knights of Columbus.
 
“Government charity is anathema to what our Founders intended and what our Constitution stands for,” DeMint said on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon.
 
“Civil society works because it’s everything that government is not – it’s small, it’s personal, it’s responsive, it’s accountable,” he said. “Civil society must be protected from anything that makes it more like government.”

Full story here.

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