Not any more at least. Prior to this bill, failing to register for Selective Services was a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to five years and/or a fine of not more than $250,000.
Now you’re automatically enrolled. I think it’s actually better this way.
Eh, military service now is 8 years right? I'd take jail and file bankruptcy. At least you'll be alive instead of cannon fodder, and it's 3 years less.
We were always forced to register. The fine and imprisonment were penalties for avoiding registration. You’d be registered at the hearing as well as facing consequences.
I don't think the military is dying at a noticeable rate, especially as "cannon fodder." A quick Google says deaths by hostile action hasn't broken the triple digits annually over the last decade. I also didn't really look at the other deaths, so feel free to dive into that side.
if they draft it's because cannon fodder is needed.
That's a big if, as you noted US hasn't drafted in forever. But even if they did draft, the US hasn't used "cannon fodder" tactics for several decades. Their technology is so advanced (and military budget/spending so high) they don't need to in order to win. Trench warfare ain't really a thing anymore.
Might as well be. Giving a gun to a murderer is as bad as pulling the trigger, and that's what supply officers do. Mechanics fix killing machines. Cooks feed killers while they're off killing. The military is a machine, and every cog in that machine is a murderer.
It was not automatic so rich people can avoid it. I have never heard of someone facing criminal charges for failing to register. I have heard that failing to register can impact eligibility for college financial aid and scholarships.
I have heard that failing to register can impact eligibility for college financial aid and scholarships.
And this is why I hate the fucking neoliberals so much. As bad as the conservatives are they don't expect me to agree with them, they just want my money. Neoliberalism demands that you not only pay a shit ton of money for student loan debt that you also internalize that you deserve to because you were privileged. They have developed economic original sin
It's unlikely to be picked up by the Democrat-controlled Senate because of numerous amendments regarding abortion, diversity efforts, and transgender medical treatments.
That seems about right. Tired of bills having all this non related crap shoved into them.
Automatic registration would replace the coming-of-age tradition that all 18-year-old male U.S. citizens experience when they get a card in the mail from Uncle Sam informing them that they're required under threat of criminal penalties to register for the Selective Service.
This ~2 decades ago for me but I have no recollection of this ever happening.
If I am ever drafted (Unlikely due to my shoulder, colorblindness, various mental health things) I will just start saying "I'm going to tell the enemy where my group is and sabotage equipment. I am a liability, you don't want me there. If you put me with radio, I will shoot that radio. If you put me in cooking, I will spill the beans. If you give me a gun, it's not going to be used at the enemy."
Will I? Probably not. But talk is cheap and I don't think a military group wants someone who publicly stated "I will commit treason and aid the enemy."
Better than shooting someone in cold blood because "murder is valid because we said it was war time." I'd rather be in jail than a murderer, I don't need to add PTSD when my brain is already fucked up.
It sounds like you really don't want the military to be fond of you anyway. Conscientious objector would be the legal route to ensure you did not go to war.
With the "it's complicated" tag. Not necessarily, there are levels of conscientious objector. It is possible to drafted into a non combat role depending on how you are classified.
I am, and they wouldn't care in a draft. I'm a suicidal weirdo who refuses to harm anyone, I barely have the will power to harm myself, let alone others stuck in similar situations.
I just will say anything to get out of service of a war.
Unless you're already in, in which case they'll put you on a mental health hold for a year or two, in the worst possible conditions, before kicking you out on your ass.
If I were an American I'd be calling their office and saying I can't fill out their form, and appearing in court to defend my violation of the law on the grounds that it's impossible to legally follow. Lying about my sex on a government form would be illegal, and I don't want to break the law.
It is required your all males. That said, you will generally only have an issue when applying for financial aid or if you want to work for the federal government.
When I applied for a license at 16 back in 2006-esk time(born in 89) it was required to sign up to acquire one. 2 years before being legally allowed to vote
As an aside, my parents kept me out of the "the system" for most of my youth so I missed my deadline, I never knew it existed.
This made me ineligible for some benefits like federal loans and other programs. I wrote to Selective Service with a notarized letter that my failure to register was truly an oversight and they sent me a waiver and cleared my status.
Just because the politicians want to grab you out of your life and use you as cannon fodder doesn't mean they want to actually be as accountable to you as they're supposed to.
Automatic registration for Selective Services, not automatic draft. That’s very different. This is actually helpful in keeping people out of prison or getting fined for not registering.
But yes, this absolutely proves that they could automatically register people to vote with no designated party affiliation.
As a European I have always been confused when Americans talk about "voter registration". The way it works in my country is you are legally required to register your residence with the government and that registration is automatically used to determine a voter registry (just filtering by age, citizenship and exclusion due to criminal convictions all of which is information already known to the government). I always just get a letter a few weeks before elections informing me where my polling place is.
Can exclude, not all of them do, I think it has to be a specific part of the sentence (ie not automatic) because some high court ruled that some years ago.
I meant not all criminal offenses necessarily cause an exclusion from voting rights. If I recall correctly there is a list of specific ones for which people can be sentenced to loss of voting rights.
German Law is very sane in regards to voting rights.
§ 13 of the German Federal Election Act (BWG) stipulates that only who is disenfranchised as a result of a judge's decision is excluded from the right to vote.
This provision does not conflict with the general principle of equality in Article 3 of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz - GG) and the principles of equality and universality of the vote, because the right to vote is not automatically revoked, but may only be revoked by a judge's ruling if certain legal requirements are met.
However, this exclusion as a result of a German court ruling is only possible in a few cases expressly mentioned in the Criminal Code (StGB) and the Federal Constitutional Court Act (BVerfGG) and applies for a maximum of two to five years. Exclusion from the right to vote applies if a person has been sentenced to at least six months or at least one year in prison for the following offenses, for example:
Preparation of a war of aggression and high treason against the Federation
Treason and disclosure of state secrets
Attack against organs and representatives of foreign states
Obstruction of elections and falsification of election documents
Bribery of members of parliament
acts of sabotage of means of defense or intelligence service endangering security (in this case, a prison sentence of at least one year is required).
In these cases, the deprivation of the right to vote is at the discretion of the court in accordance with the special criminal law provisions and is not an automatic consequence of the conviction for these criminal offenses.
Furthermore, the right to vote can be revoked by the Federal Constitutional Court due to the violation of fundamental rights.
The disenfranchisement from voting is btw. also the foundation that makes one ineligible to be elected.
According to the Federal Election Act, anyone who has German citizenship and is of legal age on the day of the election is electable. This does not apply to those who:
have lost the right to vote and therefore their eligibility to be elected as a result of a court ruling or no longer have the capacity to hold public office
is permanently dependent on a statutory caregiver / guardian
or is in a psychiatric hospital due to a conviction
Well you see, in the United States, the way some politicians, specifically ones belonging to a certain very authoritarian political party manage to get elected is by making sure people don't or can't vote.
This is often coupled with throwing a huge hissy fit about "voter fraud" which doesn't actually exist on any remotely meaningful level.
Well, voting fraud is a thing in Russia. Stuffing when one person throws multiple ballots at once, carousel when one persion votes one multiple stations, dead souls(reference to Gogol) where dead or absent people vote and Venedictov's box - when Sobyanin repeatedly claims that electronic voting results will come immidiately when voting ends, but don't long after all physical stations reported results.
Maybe, but I am more familiar Russian elections. Personal experience.
Also important note: election fraud != voting fraud. Voting fraud is just one type of election fraud. In Russia most widespread type of election fraud is not registering candidates.
Registering candidates in the US doesn't matter, I could run for president or any other office and no one would reject my application to be on the ballot, unless I didn't have enough signatures.
I would be surprised if you've ever heard of Vermin Supreme, or any of the other third party candidates for US president, much less the lower offices.
Yep. Same. You just go get stamp in passport once, then you just go to voting station with passport. That's it. Oh, also by default(when you get passport) you get stamp that you live where you lived during filing.
Now that everyone is fat and 4 👀👁️👀 eyes, those are not excuses. When I was 18 I was not even close to being fit to serve. I wear glasses and I wasn't athletic.
So figure out the way guys! Trump had to take bone spurs! I'm sure you guys can come up with something! After all, how can you serve the Chinese overlords with war wounds right?
I mean they could take the Israel approach and exterminate us. Sorry too busy with my Ps7 Nintendo switcharoo. I think that if worse comes to worse I rather go than send my kids. I've had an okay life and my arthritis is starting to hurt. I think the Republicans are hard at work on preventing access to arthritis medication probably. So maybe I could just do my thing in China. Right? Defend our way of living. I want my kids to enjoy the freedoms I had. So I would fight for that now that I'm old and fucked up. Then the kids can join in later like the ruzzians did. They basically sent all their old men out to the meat grinder. Sounds bad. But if you got arthritis and you know people who had it, you would ask for the biggest grenade you could carry. I'd take that thing like a football right into a Chinese operations building or something. I mean, if they were evil and such according to the fear mongering politicians and if I indeed had my arthritis going uncontrolled. So far it's just an elbow and a pinky.
What was the question again? Get off my lawn hooligans!
You are required to sign up but they usually only can enforce it in ways such as applying for a driver's license or voter registration. Maybe more kids aren't applying for drivers licenses and therefore aren't signing up.
$250k fine, but they haven't prosecuted anyone since the 80s, and even then, it was only a handful and typically only when the person went around bragging about it in protest.
The bigger deal is being barred from federal employment, contracts, grants, and other programs. Some states may deny drivers licenses because of it. And it used to mean you couldn't receive federal financial aid for college, but that changed in 2020.
It's bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like... you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it's possible for conscription to not come back as technically it's not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .
There's something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it "voluntary".
Many people don't pay attention. My mother (63) didn't know me or my brother were egistered when a conversation came up about it last year. Most people are so complacent in accepting every day life because they are worried about living day by day. The concept that a mother who is legally responsible for 2 kids didn't know they both signed themselves to serve in the military at 16 is baffling from a stand back and look at it mentality. (Only two kids, both sign to give their life away while her and her husban(my father) are the only ones who legally could sign our lives away at that age.)
Wish it would've happened sooner. There was some issue with my school's financial aid office every freaking semester. A week before classes started, I would get a letter that all my financial aid was canceled for failing to register, and I'd have to go in and prove I had. After the 4th time, they finally took a photocopy of my registration and had me sign an affidavit and appended it to my file.
i did not know that, thank you for letting me know, it's good that they repealed that, for my area it wouldn't have made a difference for myself registering as our high school had all of the males do it as part of a civics class.
I wouldn't put it past the Republican party to bring conscription to the table. Probably with all kinds of exceptions and loopholes to either keep their own kids out of it entirely or guarantee cush domestic desk jobs to show how patriotic they are. Everybody else gets to line up with a rifle.
Yeah, honestly as long as we aren't willing to change things in a meaningful way, this is somewhat nice. It's like voter registration. It should be automatic (assuming it's required anyway). Sadly we are more likely to make draft registration automatic before voter registration.
If there is a legitimate reason for a draft, a draft may not be necessary anyway. Unless the enemy is offering a peaceful arrangement to everyone they meet, or there's no way to get your family to safety, I think most people would willingly fight.
