Congratulations Women, Judge Rules the US Military Should Draft You Too
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It's a Federal district judge. I don't think this decision means anything yet. The Selective Service can certainly appeal this to the circuit court, and if they lose there, to the Supreme Court.
But the Selective Service might not want to appeal it. (My analysis of their motivations: Twice as many people if we need them. But twice as much paperwork even if we don't.) They might just carry this out. At that point, somebody (outside the Southern District of Texas) is going to sue to stop this, and this decision won't be binding precedent. That appeal can also go all the way to the Supreme Court.
I suspect that someone on each side will keep suing until the Supreme Court finally rules on this. I suspect that will be five to ten years.
2×0 is still 0.
The US has no conscription, or even a legal framework for conscription. It has a vestigial legacy framework preserved so that it could, in principal, bring up a system of conscription slightly more quickly than starting from a standing start if it ever adopted law authorizing it again, along with nearly half a century of deliberately constructing the military in a way which does not rely on and is not particularly adaptable to conscript service.
Yes, the law authorizing the draft expired in June 1973, after a strategy was developed and a policy decision made to pursue it to meet military needs without conscription.
Enforcement of the registration requirement that expired in the 1970s but was reactivated in 1980 without any actual draft law was discontinued by agreement between Selective Service and DoJ in 1988, but no actual prosecutions were pursued after 1986, and compliance has always been low (even with the stick of student loans, which gets lots of people heading to college registered, those who register are unlikely to update address when they move while registered.)
So: we no longer (for 45 years) have a law authorizing conscription.
We no longer (for 30 years) even pretend to have enforcement of the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it.
And we no longer (for more than the 30 years of non-enforcement, really, but even moreso after that) have much compliance with the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it.
Everything that happens around Selective Service registration requirements absent changes in all that is purely symbolic ritual with no real substance.
...the material facts will be substantially different, which means that this case, would quite plausibly, not be controlling.
And, in any case, this only deals with registration requirements, not gender differentiation in any hypothetical draft law. (The fact that draft registration doesn't do much of anything substantive makes it a lot harder to make the case that there is sufficient service to an important government interest to overcome the presumptive invalidity of gender discrimination; it's pretty much, in effect today, just an added administrative burden to men in qualifying for college loans.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam-draft.htm...
That that was true, or at least the extent to which it was true, was something which distinguished the limited, exception-heavy Vietnam-era draft from prior uses of conscription in the US.