Last month President Joe Biden used the occasion of “Equal Pay Day” to argue that men and women are more or less interchangeable parts.
“There’s not a single thing a man can do that a woman can’t do as well or better. Not a single thing,” Biden said at the time.
Conservative media personality Steve Deace, for one, underscored the obvious nonsense behind that comment.
“Shorter tee boxes in golf, the lack of female slam dunk champions, the lack of female nose tackles in the NFL, and the fact hundreds of high school boys run faster than our best adult female sprinter says otherwise,” Deace tweeted. “But thanks for your beta pandering.”
As it turns out, just three weeks later, Biden’s administration is now arguing in court that there is one thing women can’t do that men not only can do, but must do:
Register for the military draft.
In a case that is proving the old adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, the Biden administration recently urged the Supreme Court to not take up a case that, if successful, would force women to register for the draft.
The backstory begins in 1973 when the Pentagon went to an all-volunteer force. In March 1975, President Gerald Ford rescinded a legal provision that required men to register for “selective service,” aka the draft.
Five years later, however, President Jimmy Carter reversed Ford’s decision and reimplemented the Selective Service System, whereby men had to register to be eligible for a military draft within 30 days of turning 18.
According to the Epoch Times, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that women also had to register because women were excluded from combat, providing fodder for which was the main purpose of the draft.
So, for 41 years only men have been required to do so – even as more women have entered the military, and despite in 2013, under then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden, that women became eligible for jobs in combat units, and have served in hazardous duty during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Last year, a group called the National Coalition for Men sued to force women to register.
The ACLU, the Times reports, has sided with the coalition, maintaining that the current provision is sexist.
Meanwhile, the conservative Center for Military Readiness, which has long held that women should not be in combat, has argued for retaining the current system.
Now joining that group is the left-wing Biden administration.
In court records, the administration notes that the issue came up during the Trump administration. The solution was to punt.
The government created a commission to study the issue. In March 2020, the panel recommended to “eliminate male-only registration and expand draft eligibility to all individuals of the applicable age cohort.” The commission “concluded that extending the registration requirement to women is an appropriate way to increase the pool of available draftees.”
Yet the Biden administration is calling on the court to turn this down.
“Although this Court might someday wish to reconsider the constitutionality of the MSSA’s (Military Selective Service Act) registration requirement if that statutory provision remains unchanged, Congress’s attention to the question may soon eliminate any need for the Court to grapple with that constitutional question,” Biden’s lawyers argued.
“As a matter of constitutional authority and institutional competence, Congress is primarily entrusted with the responsibility to determine whether and how to alter the existing registration requirement.”
“This Court should afford Congress a reasonable opportunity to consider the Commission’s recommendations, particularly given their breadth and timing,” they added in court documents.
“It would therefore be premature for this Court to conclude that Congress has in fact declined to act on the recommendations in the Commission’s report.”
The irony of this is as nauseating as it is shocking.
For one thing, the Biden administration has made clear that its whole purpose is to deliver “equity,” meaning that outcomes, not opportunities, will be the same for all, and driven by considerations of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
For another, Biden, his spokespeople, and his media lapdogs have routinely touted the number of women he has out in high places.
Finally, when has Biden needed or worried about the role of Congress in anything he does? CNN noted on Thursday that he has signed more than 60 executive actions in less than three months, far outpacing any of his predecessors, and “equity” has been one of his three main concerns.
It’s unclear what constituency Biden is trying to please here. But this request of the Supreme Court is antithetical to everything he’s done or sought to accomplish so far, which should raise questions about what the real motive is in advocating for this delay.
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