
Congratulations Women, Judge Rules the US Military Should Draft You Too - SQL2219
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2019/february/25/congratulations-women-judge-rules-the-us-military-should-draft-you-too/
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AnimalMuppet
IANAL. Speculation follows.

It's a Federal district judge. I don't think this decision means anything yet.
The Selective Service can certainly appeal this to the circuit court, and if
they lose there, to the Supreme Court.

But the Selective Service might not _want_ to appeal it. (My analysis of their
motivations: Twice as many people if we need them. But twice as much paperwork
even if we don't.) They might just carry this out. At that point, somebody
(outside the Southern District of Texas) is going to sue to stop this, and
this decision won't be binding precedent. That appeal can also go all the way
to the Supreme Court.

I suspect that someone on each side will keep suing until the Supreme Court
finally rules on this. I suspect that will be five to ten years.

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goodroot
Gender issues are a convenient way to double productive output and,
apparently, double forced military enrolment. Mindless work for everyone; the
right to live and die for someone else's interests.

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dragonwriter
> double forced military enrolment.

2×0 is still 0.

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farisjarrah
Hmm, I didn't know that I wasn't required by law to sign up for the draft as
soon as I turned 18 as a ~30 year old male from the United States.... /s

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dragonwriter
Signing up for selective service isn't military enrollment. It's
preregistration for potential future compelled enrollment, for which no
current legal authority even exists.

The US has no conscription, or even a legal framework for conscription. It has
a vestigial legacy framework preserved so that it could, in principal, bring
up a system of conscription slightly more quickly than starting from a
standing start if it ever adopted law authorizing it again, along with nearly
half a century of deliberately constructing the military in a way which does
not rely on and is not particularly adaptable to conscript service.

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djohnston
was something dismantled after vietnam?

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dragonwriter
> was something dismantled after vietnam?

Yes, the law authorizing the draft expired in June 1973, after a strategy was
developed and a policy decision made to pursue it to meet military needs
without conscription.

Enforcement of the _registration_ requirement that expired in the 1970s but
was reactivated in 1980 without any actual _draft_ law was discontinued by
agreement between Selective Service and DoJ in 1988, but no actual
prosecutions were pursued after 1986, and compliance has always been low (even
with the stick of student loans, which gets lots of people heading to college
registered, those who register are unlikely to update address when they move
while registered.)

So: we no longer (for 45 years) have a law authorizing conscription.

We no longer (for 30 years) even pretend to have enforcement of the law
requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law
authorizing it.

And we no longer (for more than the 30 years of non-enforcement, really, but
even moreso after that) have much compliance with the law requiring
registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing
it.

Everything that happens around Selective Service registration requirements
absent changes in all that is purely symbolic ritual with no real substance.

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AnimalMuppet
So this is just legal theater? That seems plausible... right up until it
isn't. If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the
draft, this precedent will be sitting there... if it stands. (As I said
elsewhere, this story/circus won't be over until the Supreme Court decides one
way or the other.)

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dragonwriter
> If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft

...the material facts will be substantially different, which means that this
case, would quite plausibly, not be controlling.

And, in any case, this only deals with registration requirements, not gender
differentiation in any hypothetical draft law. (The fact that draft
registration doesn't do much of anything substantive makes it a lot harder to
make the case that there is sufficient service to an important government
interest to overcome the presumptive invalidity of gender discrimination; it's
pretty much, in effect today, just an added administrative burden to men in
qualifying for college loans.)

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threatofrain
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19242191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19242191).

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belltaco
Hope this lessens the appetite for war.

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scarface74
Of course it won’t. During the draft, mostly the poor and minorities get
drafted. The decision makers don’t care about the people who get drafted.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam-
draft.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam-draft.html)

~~~
dragonwriter
> During the draft, mostly the poor and minorities get drafted

That that was true, or at least the extent to which it was true, was something
which distinguished the limited, exception-heavy Vietnam-era draft from prior
uses of conscription in the US.

