A quiet effort to make women eligible for the draft was nearly included in this year’s defense bill — until a few conservatives mobilized to block it.
A quiet effort to make women eligible for the draft was nearly included in this year’s defense bill — until a few conservatives mobilized to block it.
A reform that would have required women to register for the draft is dead, at least for now. The measure, which would have expanded the language of the Selective Service from “all men” to “all Americans,” initially sailed through with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate versions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). But in what Politico described as “a stunning turnaround,” a small group of conservatives in both chambers whipped up enough last-minute opposition to kill the provision’s momentum — a major win for military concerns surrounding combat readiness and social-conservative concerns regarding the cultural breakdown in distinctions between men and women.
The push for expanding the draft beyond men began soon after women were made eligible for combat roles in the military back in 2015. At the time, Republican opposition to women in combat was tepid; although some voiced concerns about the Obama Department of Defense rule change’s leading inevitably to a female-draft requirement, there was no coordinated GOP effort to act on those concerns. Many implicitly accepted the decision: “I’ve sort of, I guess, evolved on this issue, quite frankly,” Lindsey Graham told reporters. “If the military community feels that women are capable of doing this, then I will not stand in the way.”
That deficit in serious conservative opposition gave the draft-women movement a sense of inevitability. “This is an issue that the leftists have wanted to have as a feather in their hat, to get to so-called ‘equity’ with respect to the draft, irrespective of what that means for the quality of our military and irrespective of the desires of millions of Americans who do not want to see their daughters or their wives or sisters or mothers drafted,” Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas), who played a pivotal role in killing the female-draft requirement in this year’s NDAA, told National Review. “That’s been a thing that has been percolating for a while.”
But it wasn’t just the Left pushing for female conscription — some Republicans were quick to go along. Just a few months after the ban on women in combat was lifted, two Republican congressmen, Representatives Duncan Hunter (Calif.) and Ryan Zinke (Mont.), introduced the “Draft America’s Daughters Act,” framed as a way to begin a “conversation” about the possibility of women signing up for Selective Service. On the heels of that momentum, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved the “all Americans” language in this year’s NDAA with the backing of eight of the 13 Republican members of the panel. A month later, when the House Armed Services Committee approved similar language in the lower chamber’s version of the NDAA with the support of four Republicans — which then proceeded to garner 28 Republican votes, including those of staunch social conservatives such as Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) and military hawks like Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), on the House floor — the gender-inclusive draft began to look like a shoo-in.
In the face of all that, the eleventh-hour removal of the provision from the final bicameral version of the NDAA, owing largely to the efforts of Chip Roy and Senate allies such as Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), speaks to a renewed energy and organization by the social-conservative wing. The Republican establishment has often been reluctant to use the language of traditional morality on cultural debates. As Sarah Weaver wrote in National Review last week, even most of the Republican opponents of female conscription used “a utilitarian, morally hollow line of argument” to defend their position, appealing to combat readiness over any moral objections to sending America’s mothers, sisters, and daughters to war. Others, such as Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), fully embraced the left-liberal moral framework on the issue, throwing their weight behind the draft-women provision in the name of “gender equality.”
But in the months leading up to the finalization of the NDAA, conservatives staged a public campaign against the draft-women measure with explicit appeals to the immorality of forcing American women to war. Senator Hawley introduced an amendment to remove the provision, calling it “wrong to force our daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters to fight our wars,” and introduced a “Don’t Draft Our Daughters” resolution with Republican senators Mike Lee (Utah), James Lankford (Okla.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Roger Wicker (Miss.), and Marco Rubio (Fla). In the lower chamber, Representative Roy made a similar effort, giving floor speeches, appearing on top-billing shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight, and taking to social media to blast the reform. “This is it for me,” he tweeted in July. “This is a litmus test. Fight this nonsense or we are not on the same team. Abolish the draft if you want . . . but draft my daughter you will not. #DontDraftDaughters.” (“You — including likely 28 GOP House members voting for an NDAA last night to do so — want to draft my daughter and just ‘trust you’ not to put them into combat? All of DC — all of it — can go straight to hell,” he added in early September).
“A few of us — a precious few — were early in, as early as June, sounding the alarm bells out publicly on social media, writing op-eds and editorials, laying out our strong opposition and belief that we reflected the values of the people that we represent in our districts to oppose this,” Roy told National Review. “We got this out there to frame the debate.”
“My view was that the way to stop this was to try and make it as public as possible,” Hawley agreed. In practice, that meant a “two-pronged approach,” he told National Review: “Fight hard to make sure you actually got an amendment on the floor vote, and then once you did get a vote, make sure the public knew what was at stake here, and put every senator on the record.”
“As it turns out, it’s not a very popular provision — and the more public you make that conversation, the less appealing it came to be for our friends across the aisle,” Hawley said.
It’s true that as of August, less than half of Americans supported drafting women, and support has been falling precipitously since the issue became a live debate in 2016. But opponents of the proposal say that rallying that public sentiment to their side required appealing to the explicitly moral dimensions of the debate. “I just think it’s common sense,” Hawley told National Review. “It’s certainly what the people of my state believe, and I think most of the American people do, too. [They feel] that there’s something wrong with carrying out the largest expansion of forced conscription in American history and [applying that to] women, particularly 19-, 20-, 21-year-old women, against their will. Saying, ‘Oh, no, actually, you are going to register for the draft, and we don’t care what your life plans are, and we don’t care what you’re doing or planning to do, or if you’re a mother or not, or are planning to be a mother or have a family — doesn’t matter. We’re going to force you all to do it.’
“Most people just think, ‘Hold on a minute, why exactly would we force women to serve against their will?’” Hawley said. “Why would we forcefully conscript them? Is it because we have a shortage of available people to serve? No, that’s not it. At the end of the day, the reason is the Democrats’ social agenda — their gender-ideology agenda. And most Americans just don’t agree with that.”
That appeal to the American conscience on behalf of a small band of Republican senators and congressmen represents a significant victory for conservatives. As National Review’s editors have written on multiple occasions, expanding the draft to include women would be both immoral and harmful to America’s national-security interests. On top of that, it would represent a shameful acquiescence to left-wing cultural ideology — an acquiescence that, as Republicans such as Roy and Hawley proved this week, is entirely unnecessary.
But in light of that, it’s striking that so many Republicans were willing to go along with the provision in the first place. Hawley chose his words carefully on this issue: “I can’t speak for any of them,” he said of Republican colleagues who backed the measure. But, he added, “my observation about these committee hearings and markups, especially ones like the NDAA that happen behind closed doors, is that there gets to be an internal momentum in the committee, and since it’s happening behind closed doors, and there’s no public accountability, it sort of takes on a life of its own, which is why I always think it’s best to open up the windows and let the light in. When you bring things out in the public domain, they often look different.”
Roy was blunter. “If Republicans can’t win those fights, then what are we fighting for? Tax cuts for corporations? I mean, frickin’ shoot me in the damn head,” he said. “We have a calling to stand up for the people in this country, and we damn well ought to do it. And that’s what I think we just showed you can do if you unite to do so.”