Draft Reform?

Beneath the almost laughable fuss surrounding the House Armed Services Committee hearings on the draft is a sobering fact: by the time Congress is ready to present the President with a new Selective Service Act, there will be little left resembling the Marshall Commission's laudable recommendations for draft reform. All of the committee members' raging against Stokely Carmichael and all of their prattle about the First Amendment should not obscure the slow erosion of what once seemed a genuine attempt to improve the draft.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has already taken the position that undergraduate deferments should not be retained, contrary to the Commission's wishes. And the draft legislation that emerges from the House committee, if Chairman L. Mendel Rivers (D.-S.C.) has his way, will block the creation of a lottery for 19-year-olds.

Even in dealing with graduate deferments, which the Commission would have virtually eliminated, Congress may be tempted to create a host of loopholes for fields "in the national interest." The essential inequity of deferments-turned-exemptions could remain unsolved. Part of the problem is that Rivers and other conservatives are exploiting the issue of draft reform for their own purposes. To them, draft reform means jailing dissenters rather than ending the injustices that provoked the dissent. Men who should be involved in refining and writing draft legislation will find themselves defending the right of free speech against what amounts to a diversionary attack.

Draft reform is in trouble; whether the new system that will eventually emerge from a Senate-House conference committee will be any better than the old is anyone's guess. Some of the Marshall Commission's ideas are certainly dead; no one, for example, either in the White House or in the Congress, is going to fight for the abolition of 2-S deferments. If the lottery and the elimination of graduate deferments suffer the same fate, then the new Selective Service Act will differ only in detail from its unwieldy and unfair predecessor.