The Senate recessed on Thursday and won’t return for another two weeks, meaning the issue of women’s conscription will remain unresolved through the July 4 recess.
This is a pretty big deal, at least in the US as a whole. In Washington, it’s business as usual and being explained calmly. The House of Representatives passed a House version of the National Defense Authorization Act on Friday, June 14, that doesn’t require women to register for the draft. The following week, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a House version of the bill that sneaks in infrastructure to draft women. Now the bill is in “conference,” where House and Senate committees and staff will iron out differences.
“This is an issue that voters just can’t stomach, regardless of what part of the country they’re from or what party they belong to.”
The move has “provoked backlash from some on the far right,” a particularly inept reporter at the New York Post claimed Thursday, but the Democrats’ strange obsession with drafting women seems to be generating more widespread discomfort.
And it’s a Democratic project. Though the committee process is confidential, The Blaze News has learned that multiple Senate Democrats have previously introduced the idea to the committee along partisan lines, without Republican support.
His Democratic colleagues, who are up for reelection outside the committee, aren’t singing quite as enthusiastically. When caught up with by reporters, Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) claimed they were unaware of the proposal. Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.), who is in a particularly close race with Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy, told the Washington Examiner that “it’s something we need to look at.”
“This is a basic human instinct,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Blaze News. “As long as able-bodied men can fight, we’re not going to send women to fight. This is a basic concept. We don’t even have to get to the point of having a moral question about this. This is a survival issue. This is not something you want to do as a human being if you want to survive.”
No Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee reportedly voted “yes,” but the committee passed the measure 22-3, including a no vote from the Democratic chairman, who opposed violating the budget caps. The budget cap increase is classified, but senators can state their vote and future plans when they want to score political points.
“There are some Republicans who are opposed to this,” Lee told The Blaze News, “but some of the Republicans who were opposed also supported moving the bill forward in committee. So it’s just a question of how much resistance they put up between now and when the bill goes to the floor.”
And not all Republicans are opposed to the idea. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said drafting women is about “opportunity.”
“This isn’t about fighting,” she told reporters. “This is about giving them an opportunity to serve.”
Defenders of the system argue that it’s not technically a conscription. That’s true: the U.S. hasn’t had a conscription since the Vietnam War, and reinstating it would require an additional act of Congress. But that’s true until the U.S. decides it’s time to reinstate the military. At that point, a promise not to draft women would become a promise not to draft women into combat roles, only to draft women into combat roles. This is creating the foundation for politicians to do exactly what they claim they won’t do. Improbable, to say the least.
“Once it’s made into law, it creates an expectation that women will be drafted. The next time there’s a draft, women will be drafted,” Lee said.
Republicans will have to think about how hard they’re willing to fight after July 4th. Too many politicians have unwittingly embraced the modern feminist trope. Meanwhile, Democrats will have to decide how important it is to them to draft women, and whether it’s worth putting vulnerable colleagues like Brown and Tester in a bind.
Even after the holidays are over, the summer schedule isn’t long: While committee staff will be working hard throughout the holidays, the actual House and Senate committees are scheduled to meet for only a combined 11 days before going on their long August recess.
That would give opponents of women’s conscription time to get their message out. “Once you get public attention, that changes things,” Lee told The Blaze News. “Because when people are angry, they realize it’s not worth the squeeze. … This is an issue that voters, no matter what part of the country they’re from or what party they belong to, are not convinced about.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who led the opposition to the last time Congress proposed drafting women three years ago, was a bit more blunt: “If the Republican Party even thinks about drafting women, I will be totally committed to destroying what’s left of the party,” he told The Blaze News.
Washington Examiner:Senate Democrats sidestep debate on expanding military eligibility to women
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The Fire is Burning: The Weekly Dish: My Problems — and Our Problems — with IVF
Blogger Andrew Sullivan probably
Most Influential A journalist explains the long road to same-sex marriage in America, and it gets even more interesting when he speaks out against IVF.
That’s the difficulty for me. A lot of the time, You are creating new life only to destroy it as waste. In many other cases, you do not destroy them, you simply use them to overcome difficulties. They are merely a means to an end, violating the basic norms of human dignity that cannot be violated. And these “means” are your own offspring. With IVF, the mother must literally play Sophie’s Choice over and over again.
And to erase from our hearts the people who have been abandoned, Once the fetus has been disposed of, abortion is not permissible because the fetus is still alive. Freezing the fetus is an acknowledgement that the fetus may one day turn from a human into a human being, and the grave consequences that come with that. And before your eyes may be a growing child, born through IVF, with a few living siblings, simply frozen in eternal darkness.
That’s something I can really relate to. Over 600,000 people The future of humanity is waiting in the “cryonursery” for the lights to come on – millions of our brothers and sisters. The son or daughter is forced to live outside the body indefinitely. It is true that the frozen fetus has no memory, no senses, no mind or will. It does not suffer. But the absence of suffering does not mean the absence of sorrow, or the absence of humanity.
