Author: Edward Hasbrouck

After hearings on its policy and fiscal implications, the California Senate has deferred action on a bill to automatically register draft-age applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System (SSS) for a possible future military draft, by placing the bill on the Senate Appropriations Committee “suspense file”. This means that unless the Senate Appropriations Committee decides by May 17, 2024, to call up the bill and forward it to the state Senate floor, the bill will be dead.

The Acting Director of the Selective Service System (who had been on the West Coast to swear in a new Washington State Director of Selective Service) and the Deputy Associate SSS Director for Legislative Affairs spent several days in Sacramento lobbying state Senators in support of SB-1081. The Acting SSS Director was the lead witness in support of SB-1081 at the Senate Transportation Committee hearing on April 9th.

Continue reading “California Senate Puts Selective Service Bill ‘In Suspense’”

A bill to automatically register draft-age applicants for California driver’s licenses with the Selective Service System (SSS) has been set for its first first hearing in Room 1200 of the State Capitol Annex “Swing Space” building, 1021 O St. in Sacramento (2 blocks south of the Capitol) in Sacramento at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, before the Senate Committee on Transportation. Only in-person testimony will be accepted, with no remote testimony or livestream, but written testimony can be submitted until April 1, 2024.

The hearing on April 9th will be only the first of several, if the bill moves forward, but will set the tone for debate on the bill.

Continue reading “California Selective Service Bill Set for Hearing in Sacramento April 9th”

A bill to require applicants for California driver’s licenses ages 16 through 25 to consent to registration with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft, SB 1081, has been introduced again in the California legislature.

The sole initial sponsor of SB 1081 is state Senator Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera), who represents Senate District 30 in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

With no legislation on Selective Service under active consideration in Congress, this California bill is the most significant legislative proposal related to Selective Service currently under consideration anywhere in the U.S. It will be the highest lobbying priority this year for the Selective Service System nationally and for its California state director John A. Arbogast, local and state draft board members, and military reservists assigned to Selective Service support duty in California.

Continue reading “California Bill Would Require Draft Registration for Driver’s Licenses”

On Friday, 22 December 2023, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the Federal government’s 2024 fiscal year into law.

The signing of the annual NDAA has often been an occasion for pomp and publicity, but this year it was done with no public ceremony and the tersest possible statement from the White House, on a date chosen to minimize news coverage and public notice.

Notably, this year’s NDAA as enacted makes no mention whatsoever of the Selective Service System.

Continue reading “Annual ‘Defense’ Bill Leaves Selective Service in Limbo”

David Harris speaks to a crowd of around 20,000 people at the East Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration on the steps of the U.S. Capital, Washington, DC, March 22, 1980. Photo from Resistance News. David Harris also participated in a resistance workshop the following day with some of the next generation of draft registration resisters.

After Muhammad Ali, David Harris (February 28, 1946-February 6, 2023) was probably the most influential figure in the resistance to the military draft during the US war in Indochina, and an important ally to a younger cohort of resisters to draft registration, including me and others, since 1980.

The most obvious assumption of military conscription is that the lives of young people in this country belong not to those young people; the lives of those young people instead are possessions of the state, to be used by the state when and where the state chooses to use them. The decisions made by those young people are not decisions made on the terms that they find in their lives. They are rather decisions that are made on the terms of the state because those people belong to the state….

Conscription does not exist without you and me…. The most elaborate bureaucracy for Selective Service in the world does not function without people such as you and me willing to sign our lives over to that system. Without you and me, it’s nothing…. American totalitarianism is participatory. Which means that if you don’t buy it, it doesn’t move. And I don’t buy it.

Continue reading “RIP: In Memory and in Honor of Draft Resister David Harris”

For the third time in the last six years, proposals to expand the current Selective Service registration requirement to include young women as well as young men were included in versions of this year’s annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023, but were removed in back-room House-Senate leadership negotiations.

All mention of Selective Service has been removed from the conference proposal for the FY2023 NDAA introduced yesterday in the House Rules Committee.

As in 2016 and 2021, this year’s proposals to expand Selective Service registration to women were bundled into 2,000-page drafts of the NDAA without any hearings or floor debate in either the House or Senate, and without any consideration of the alternative bipartisan proposal – which has yet to receive a hearing or floor consideration in either the House or Senate – to repeal the Military Selective service Act and end draft registration entirely.

Continue reading “Congress Again Backs Away From Expansion of Draft Registration”