GOP stages House vote to kill off draft rumors

By Charles Babington and Don Oldenburg
The Washington Post

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Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, a co-sponsor of the bill, also voted against it.

The vote put an end to HR 163, but Democrats and Republicans signaled they will continue to accuse one another of contemplating a revival of conscription, at least through the final month of the presidential campaign, and probably as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq.

For 18 months, House Republican leaders ignored the bill, sponsored by liberal Democrats who complained that minorities and low-income Americans are doing a disproportionate share of the fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent days, however, Republicans grew increasingly alarmed by sometimes vague, sometimes direct suggestions that President Bush has a secret plan to reinstate the draft if re-elected.

Bush has tried to strangle the rumors himself, as when he told Iowa voters Monday: "We will not have a draft, so long as I am president of the United States." But his House GOP allies decided that wasn't enough. Yesterday they surprised Democrats by placing the long-neglected bill on that evening's "suspension calendar," a little-heralded device that traditionally contains nothing more controversial than renaming post offices or lauding volunteers.

The goal, Republicans said, was to show voters that only Democrats have made an official bid to renew the draft.

"After all the conspiracy talk and e-mails flying all over this country, especially the conspiracy talk we've heard lately from the (John) Kerry Democrats, we took a look around and found that the only plan to bring back the military draft, secret or not, was the Democrats,' " said Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. "We're going to bring it out there and we're going to put a nail in that coffin."

House Democrats refused to take the obvious bait. The bill's main sponsor, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., called a news conference to say he would vote against his bill and to denounce Republicans as cynics who use parliamentary rules for political manipulations rather than debates of serious topics.

"It is so darn hypocritical for the Congress to come forward and put a (controversial) bill on the suspension calendar," Rangel said. "It's a shame that ... this legislative body is being used as a political tool on the eve of elections."

Rangel and several co-sponsors said they introduced the bill primarily to raise awareness of who makes up the bulk of the volunteer army and to stimulate debate about the administration's military and economic policies. The nation now has "an indirect draft of minorities and the poor," people left out of Bush's tax cuts and struggling to find jobs, said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
 
GOP leaders said that in calling Rangel's bill to a vote, they were simply taking his proposal to restart the debate at face value, and putting people's minds at ease. Americans, said Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., "have been whipped into a frenzy by this controversy."

Republicans first had to obtain a parliamentary ruling letting them bring up a bill that not a soul would claim to support. "That's the first time ever, probably, in the history of the United States" that a measure came to the floor in such a fashion, said Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. His panel never held a hearing on the bill, he noted, and to vote on it "is nothing more than a cynical election-year political ploy."

Voting for the measure were Reps. John Murtha, D-Pa., who long has argued the United States needs more troops in Iraq, and Pete Stark, D-Calif., a 32-year House veteran.

Top Democrats said the vote won't end worries about Bush's intentions. "Anyone who says the policies of this administration will lead to a draft is absolutely correct," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

With no end to the war in Iraq in sight and military personnel stretched thin, many young Americans have ignored Bush's and Kerry's statements that no military draft is in the works. Some parents are tormented by the prospect that, pressured by the war on terrorism, Bush might attempt to renew conscription. In 1973, the Pentagon altered the system, developing an all-volunteer force with combat support provided by the National Guard and Reserves, and a standby draft.

Laurie Rivlin Heller of Mothers United to Stop Draft called yesterday's House vote "a public relations stunt." The question isn't whether there will be a draft next year, she said, but in two or even five years.

"People doing the analysis of boots on the ground, including the generals, know there is a shortage and will continue to be a shortage," she said. "So how are they going to fill the need? When push comes to shove, they are going to fill it with our children."