The defense spending authorization bill that passed the Senate earlier this week included a controversial provision to extend draft registration to women, which supporters have heralded as inevitable progress toward more perfect gender equality.
But in a twist, the congressman who introduced the co-ed Selective Service amendment in the first place had hoped it would fail.
California Republican congressman Duncan Hunter added the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to stir up opposition to the idea of women serving on the front lines, a topic of renewed debate since the Obama administration opened all combat roles to women back in December. But Hunter’s plan backfired.
First, the amendment narrowly passed the House Armed Services Committee in April in a “gotcha” moment for Democrats. The issue became even thornier on a technicality: The Congressional Budget Office projected enough women would refuse to register for the Selective Service—thereby cutting themselves off from benefits like federal student aid—that the amendment was estimated to be a cost-saving measure. Because House budget rules dictate that such a provision making it out of committee can’t be struck without equal offsets, wary Republicans had to scramble for a solution.
That ultimately came from two Republican chairmen, Mac Thornberry of Armed Services committee and Pete Sessions of the Rules committee. Thornberry pushed to replace the draft measure with a deeper study of its potential consequences. Sympathetic to his cause, Sessions, whose committee makes the voting rules for legislation on the House floor, used a parliamentary trick to swap out Hunter’s amendment for Thornberry’s language. The House passed the bill in May free of the Hunter amendment.
But the Senate version of the NDAA included the Selective Service language, as well, and it passed the upper chamber on an 85-13 vote. The House and Senate bills, which differ on the draft, will be reconciled in conference committee within the next several weeks or months before returning to a vote.
Hunter’s office did not reply to a request for comment on the amendment’s unintended progress. A Republican aide with the Armed Services committee says Hunter didn’t expect his amendment to get this far and will continue to oppose it. While it’s fairly common to use amendment proposals just to provoke discussion, the aide said, it’s unusual for one to get so far despite its sponsor’s strong ideological opposition.
Still, strong resistance to the provision could come from the House, where power is more diffuse and ideological agendas take a back seat to practical governance. “I think there’s strong opposition to it on the House side,” said another Armed Services aide, adding that the Senate’s adoption of it was premature.
“They’re legislating in advance of the facts on this,” he said of the senators backing the measure. “And we need to better understand the modern [implications]—no one’s looked at selective service since the nineties—and we need to better understand the circumstances under which we might use it in modern warfare and how a call-up would work.”
