Oh BTW

[Guest GreatOne]

House kills draft bill

 

Now can we PLEASE shut the fuck up about a draft?

[Guest Cerebus]

Jeez, what a clusterfuck that debate must have been considering it was a 402-2 vote.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

Who were the 2 who voted for it I wonder?

[teke184 0]

Charles Rangel and who else?

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

John Murtha (D-PA) and Pete Stark (D-CA) voted for it

 

Charles Rangel voted against it. Yes, he voted against a bill that he sponsored

 

Out of the 14 co-sponsors, 13 could vote, 12 voted against it, Corrine Brown didn't vote

[UZI Suicide 0]

Yeah, because it's impossible for another bill to be brought up after the election right?

[Guest MikeSC]

Yeah, because it's impossible for another bill to be brought up after the election right?

Hopefully, the Dems won't.

-=Mike

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

It'll never happen. Voting for this is the equal of committing political suicide and maybe even party suicide. And Bush would veto this real quick anyways. The only people wanting to vote for this are trying to scare people away from supporting the current war.

[Guest INXS]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Damnit, INXS, I was going to say something funny about this, but you already beat me to it and there's no way I can one-up what you said.

 

Damn you to hell...

[Guest Cerebus]

Yeah 402 members of the House are all on Bush's nefarious plan to invade the middle east after the election.

[Guest GreatOne]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

Why dammit why?

 

(In reference to INXS in general)

[Justice 0]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

... No offense to any Brits or foreigners around because this is specifically aimed at INXS, but it's obvious that not being in the country has seriously hindered your understanding of American politics. You are an idiot. Goodbye.

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

usually bills which are voted down by a margin of 400 votes are brought up as a show.

 

Unless i'm missing the session of Congress where they vote down all the stupid bills that they kept dead for 18 months

[Guest BDC]

I agree, I think this was voted on in order to show everyone that Congress would piss all over an idea as blatantly bad as this one.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

...not being in the country has seriously hindered your understanding of American politics....

Oh, I think he would pretty much be the same if he were born on American soil...

[Guest SP-1]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

That's a fact, huh?

 

Source?

[Guest BDC]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

That's a fact, huh?

 

Source?

Given that he doesn't know the Two War doctrine, I think there's something missing.

 

See, the reason that the guard is called up so much is because they're trying to keep the rotation going, such as it is.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Just let him be, SP. If you try to counter with logic you'll end up like him...

[Guest SP-1]

Just let him be, SP. If you try to counter with logic you'll end up like him...

Indeed.

[Guest ArchoanJB]

Wait, didn't I read a report that we are currently using only about 5% of the current US forces so far? (like 125,000 out of 2 million). Reallllll streched there.

[Guest MikeSC]

This means absolutely nothing. A bill can come up in the future. Look at the facts: Bush is hell bent on invading most of the middle east and the US armed forces are stretched as it is.

Time for a hint:

 

If we wanted to invade the Middle East --- we would have by now.

-=Mike

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

One speech from the floor debate which is either good (or loud) depending on your POV:

 

http://www.samdamon.com/damon/tim_ryan.wmv

 

and some more speeches from the floor.

 

From the representatives for the bill

 

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) who is an outstanding member of this House of Representatives, and he is in support of this bill.

 

   Mr. MURTHA. Mr. Speaker, I hate to rise in opposition to both leaderships on both sides of the aisle. I am probably the only one that is going to vote for a draft. I believe we have to start looking at this right now. And I will tell you why it is a serious problem. We have 135,000 troops in Iraq right now. We are going to have to have 135,000 there for at least 2 years. We are training people, the Iraqis about 4,000 a month, and a lot of them are deserting. So there is no way that we have had cooperation with the international community. There is no way we are going to be able to do the fourth round of replacement without some kind of a draft.

 

   Now, I remember the President of the United States asking to extend the National Guard in 1941, just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He extended it by one vote, and this is serious business here. We can get up and talk politics, we can get up and blame each other for what we are involved in here, but we have to have the personnel to do this job.

 

   I go out to the hospitals every week, and I see these young people who are in their second and third tours in Iraq. I see them without legs and without arms, and I know how hard this is.

 

   Now, let me tell you, on the street that I lived on when I was a kid, four people in my family, my father and three of his brothers, were involved in World War II. Some of them were drafted, and some of them were volunteers. And in the next house, there were seven from the same family. In the next house from that, there were six from the same family that went into World War II. Now, they went; some drafted, and some not drafted. We had 15 million people. We are in a war. And not only a small segment of the population should fight in that war.

 

   I voted against the volunteer army in the first place because I said that I did not believe that, if we got into a crucial situation, we would be able to sustain our national security. This is a national security problem. This is something we have to face now.

 

   I remember standing right over here when Jack Kemp was a Member, and he did not want to vote to extend registration because he believed it was not necessary. I said, Jack, we have to be prepared here. We have to be prepared in case something happens.

 

   They have advertisements for the volunteer army, and they say, we want you to come in. We want you to get an education. We want you to better yourselves. We want you to come in, and you will have a steady job, and an awful lot of people joined the military with that in mind.

   I was talking to a father the other day. He said his father was in World War II. His uncle was in the Battle of the Bulge, and another uncle served in the Pacific. And he was in the Reserves, and his boy was just killed in Iraq. And he was so worried because they were sending people back for the second and third time.

 

   I mean, we have got people in the National Guard who they have stopped letting out. His son was supposed to come home in August, and he was killed.

 

   Now, that is the kind of thing we are facing. This should not only be borne by people who are volunteering because they could not find a job. This is something that every one of us across the board, rich and poor, everyone should be willing to serve in the armed services of the United States.

 

   Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

 

   Mr. MURTHA. I yield to the gentleman from California.

 

   Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I would like to associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman and support his position.

 

   Mr. MURTHA. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that we would take this seriously. I would hope that we would not get into a political debate about whether this is politics or not. I would hope we would look ahead.

 

   What I said before, my colleagues have got to remember we have got 135,000 troops on the ground. We have sent some of these people back a couple of times. The Army is looking at the possibility of having a 6-month tour, and that will not help the situation because they are going to have to send them back sooner. Some of the people who are supposed to be home for a year are unable to stay home for a year.

 

   I remember being in Europe talking to General Jones, and they extended the 1st Infantry Division. He was worried that the families, because they extended them, how many people would be killed and what a pressure that would put on the families. All of us worry about that. All of us have to worry about that. That is our job, and we have to look ahead.

 

   We cannot just look ahead to the election. We have got to look ahead after the election at what it is going to mean to our troops.

 

   I think that we make a mistake when we get up here and accuse each other when we are in a war. When we were in a war in World War II, we were attacked here, and everybody ought to be willing to serve. I mean, a draft is a fair way to cut, no deferments for anybody. We pick it by lottery; we take the number of people we need and send it down to the Armed Forces.

 

   Let me tell my colleagues something. They are already taking category fours, and I think that is good for the country. I think it is good because the best training people will get in the world today is the military training. They will take category fours, and they will make those people into good citizens. They will work them, and the Army does not like it. The military does not like category fours because it is too much time to train those people.

 

   Let me tell my colleagues something. All of us need everybody to go into the Armed Forces. From every level, from the rich and the poor, from the middle class, everybody needs to go, and we have to, and there is no question about it. If we are going to be there, if what the leaders on both sides are saying, both candidates are saying, we are going to be there. We are not going to leave there until the Iraqis can take over. They cannot take over overnight. It is going to take time to train those people; and if we are going to train those people, we have got to have somebody in the United States who can replace them.

 

   It takes us a year to train. The gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), the chairman, and I put in the money for the extra 30,000 people because we knew they needed 30,000 people this year. I asked the personnel guy, are you going to ask for this in the budget this year? He said, no, sir, we are going to expect a supplemental to take care of it.

 

   The point is, we needed an extra 30,000 people. We have got to face that we are in a war, and we have got to face that everybody should be bearing the burden of this war, not just the few volunteers that are time after time sacrificing and the young people are being so mangled by this war. Their spirit aside, they are doing a marvelous job and are so proud.

 

   When I go out to the hospital every week, Bethesda one week and Walter Reed the next week, and I see these young people, and even then the fighting is so intense that they are saying to me, this is a tough war, Congressman, and we need help, we need support; and we are giving them support. In this Congress, we are giving them everything they need except we are not looking ahead to the very thing that we are going to need down the road and that is additional troops, and we are not meeting the requirement of the National Guard, and that is the first step.

 

   So I would ask Members to reconsider this, and I would hope that a number of us would vote for a draft as a serious business rather than talking of politics and the whole thing.

 

and Rangel

 

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

 

   I want to applaud the candidness and the honesty of the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services to admit that they are using the Rules of the House of Representatives to rebut the rumors on the Internet that President Bush wants to enact a draft. I thought we did this through the Republican National Committee. This is a political thing.

 

   It may be vicious to believe that people do not trust the President when he says no, and they do not trust Rumsfeld, and they do not trust Republicans; that is a terrible political problem, but do not use my House of Representatives to correct it. Do not use the rules of this House to correct it. This place is a place for legislation and not to play political games.

 

   If you do not have the trust of the American people when you say there is not going to be a draft, then you had better use the Republican National Campaign Committee to rebut it. But each time you think you have to run an election on the Rules of this House, after all of us are gone, we have an obligation to those who succeed us to abide by the Rules of the House that were left to us for one purpose: not to win elections, but to legislate.

 

and again

 

Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

 

   My Republican colleagues have convinced me they will not vote for a draft before this election, and I appreciate their sincerity in stating that. But I support my bill for the very reasons that the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) has done so.

 

   If the issue is the protection of our country against an enemy, then all Americans should have the opportunity to fight and defend for all our freedom so that we can sit here. And there should be a plea for the rich and the poor, which is so eloquently stated but not followed, to be volunteering and joining and having the honor to say they defended our country at a time of war.

 

   Mr. Speaker, that is not going to happen before the election, and because of my 34 years in the House and my respect for the rules, as much as I appreciate the fact that the leadership has brought my bill up, even though they did not support it, they have brought my bill up because they have a problem with the President's integrity on this issue.

 

   So as much as I appreciate that, what I appreciate more are the standing committees that we have in this House, and so I would hope that my bill will be referred to the committee process for hearings so that the entire House of Representatives would understand the necessity for this legislation.

 

   But on this I will vote ``no''.

 

from Ron Paul

 

Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose H.R. 163 in the strongest possible terms. The draft, whether for military purposes or for some form of ``national service,'' violates the basic moral principles of individual liberty upon which this country was founded. Furthermore, the military neither wants nor needs a draft.

 

    The Department of Defense, in response to calls to reinstate the draft has confirmed that conscription serves no military need. Defense officials from both parties have repudiated the need to reinstate the draft. For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that, ``The disadvantages of using compulsion to bring into the armed forces the men and women needed are notable,'' while President William Clinton's Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera, in a speech before the National Press Club, admitted that, ``Today, with our smaller, post-Cold War armed forces, our stronger volunteer tradition and our need for longer terms of service to get a good return on the high, up-front training costs, it would be even harder to fashion a fair draft.''

   However, the most important reason to oppose H.R. 163 is that a draft violates the very principals of individual liberty upon which our nation was founded. Former President Ronald Reagan eloquently expressed the moral case against the draft in the publication Human Events in 1979: ``..... [conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the State. If we buy that assumption then it is for the State--not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers--to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.''

 

   Some say the 18 year old draftee ``owes it'' to his (or her, since N.R. 163 makes woman eligible for the draft) country. Hogwash! It just as easily could be argued that a 50 year-old chicken-hawk, who promotes war and places the danger on innocent young people, owes more to the country than the 18 year-old being denied his (or her) liberty.

 

   All drafts are unfair. All 18 and 19 year olds are never drafted. By its very nature a draft must be discriminatory. All drafts hit the most vulnerable young people, as the elites learn quickly how to avoid the risks of combat.

 

   Economic hardship is great in all wars and cannot be minimized. War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditure. The great tragedy of war is that is enables the careless disregard for civil liberties of our own people. Abuses of German and Japanese Americans in World War I and World War II are well known.

 

   But the real sacrifice comes with conscription--forcing a small number of young vulnerable citizens to fight the wars that older men and women, who seek glory in military victory without themselves being exposed to danger, promote. The draft encourages wars with neither purpose nor moral justification and that are too often not even declared by the Congress.

 

   Without conscription, unpopular wars are difficult to fight. Once the draft was    undermined in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War came to an end. But most importantly, liberty cannot be preserved by tyranny. A free society must always resort to volunteers. Tyrants think nothing of forcing men to fight and serve in wrongheaded wars. A true fight for survival and defense of America would elicit, I am sure, the assistance of every able-bodied man and woman. This is not the case for wars of mischief far away from home in which we have experienced often in the past century.

 

   A government that is willing to enslave some of its people can never be trusted to protect the liberties of its own citizens. I hope all my colleagues join me in standing up for individual liberty and to shut down this un-American relic of a bygone era and help realize the financial savings and the gains to individual liberties that can be achieved by ending Selective Service registration.