CONGRESS In strange maneuver, GOP calls up 'dusty' bill on draft

Most volunteers joined the Army because of the Bush economy, Democrats said.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Rumors of reinstating the military draft, which have flourished for months in panicky e-mails, online chat rooms, college dorms and student newspapers, suddenly erupted Tuesday on the House floor in one of the strangest parliamentary maneuvers in memory.
With even its sponsor voting against it, a bill to require young adults to perform military or civil service failed, 402 to 2.
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 presidential campaign's final month, 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."
Surprise move
But his House GOP allies decided that wasn't enough. On Tuesday 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 F.] 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'," Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, told reporters. "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 Republican floor manager 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.