{"id":47778,"date":"2024-05-22T08:02:16","date_gmt":"2024-05-22T16:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=47778"},"modified":"2024-05-22T08:02:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-22T16:02:16","slug":"california-senate-to-vote-on-automatic-sign-up-for-military-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/22\/california-senate-to-vote-on-automatic-sign-up-for-military-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"California Senate To Vote on Automatic Sign-Up for Military Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

The California Senate will vote this week on a bill<\/a> to automatically register register draft-age applicants for driver\u2019s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System<\/a> for a possible future military draft.<\/p>\n

The floor vote in the state Senate on SB-1081<\/a> is expected this week and could come at any time. You can use this form<\/a> to send a message today to your state Senator to oppose SB-1081.<\/p>\n

SB-1081 was held in the \u2018suspense\u2019 file<\/a> by the Senate Appropriations Committee, but was called up and sent to the floor for a vote by the full state Senate despite both Democratic and Republican opposing votes in committee, with only minor amendments that fail to assuage any of the opponents of the bill.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As amended, SB-1081 is still opposed by a diverse coalition<\/a> including the ACLU, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.<\/p>\n

SB-1081 was amended to exempt applicants for driver\u2019s licenses or state IDs who can\u2019t prove lawful residence (but who still need licenses to drive) from being automatically registered with the Selective Service System (SSS). But foreign students and H-1 visa holders, who often live in the USA for years and get regular driver\u2019s licenses, are considered \u201cnonimmigrants\u201d and aren\u2019t required or allowed to register<\/a> with the SSS.<\/p>\n

The state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) would have to question every draft-aged applicant for a driver\u2019s license about their immigration and visa status, and record this information, to determine which drivers\u2019 information to send to the SSS. Otherwise, thousands of individuals who are neither required nor allowed to register with the SSS, and who wouldn\u2019t be subject to a draft, would automatically be mis-registered with the SSS \u2014 rendering the registration database less accurate<\/a> than ever.<\/p>\n

The SSS only allows or requires individuals to register for the draft if they were assigned male at birth, regardless of current gender. But applicants can self-select whether to have an \u201cM\u201d, \u201cF\u201d, or \u201cX\u201d gender marker on their California driver\u2019s license, and the same is now true for U.S. passports and Social Security accounts. Especially for individuals born outside the USA, there may be no record in any current Federal or state record of their sex as assigned at birth. So the DMV would also have to question every draft-age applicant about their sex as assigned at birth, and include this in DMV records, to determine who is, and who is not, required to register with the SSS.<\/p>\n

All this would be costly. SB-1081 was amended to give the DMV more time to implement its requirements, but the analysis prepared for the Senate Appropriations Committee still found that it would have \u201cunknown, likely significant\u201d costs that would have to be borne from the state\u2019s General Fund.<\/p>\n

Tell your California Senator<\/a> to just say \u201cNo\u201d to SB-1081 and to using the state DMV to try to salvage the failed<\/a> Federal scheme to gear up for a return to a military draft.<\/p>\n

Edward Hasbrouck maintains the <\/em>Resisters.info<\/em><\/a> website and publishes the <\/em>\u201cResistance News\u201d newsletter<\/em><\/a>. He was <\/em>imprisoned in 1983-1984<\/em><\/a> for organizing resistance to draft registration.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The California Senate will vote this week on a bill to automatically register register draft-age applicants for driver\u2019s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System for a possible future military draft. The floor vote in the state Senate on SB-1081 is expected this week and could come at any time. You can use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-47778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47783,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47778\/revisions\/47783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47778"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=47778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}