Draft Registration Fades as an Issue; Congressional Opponents Fall Silent

The only people in Washington still cheering about draft registration work for the Selective Service system. But no one--including those congressmen who passionately opposed registration's renewal last spring--seem particularly interested in stopping it, so the sign-up cards keep fluttering in.

Ignoring questions about how the government plans to enforce the program, and about President Reagan's skeptical view of registration, Selective Service officials continue to praise their own perseverence.

"We now know we will save the country four to five weeks in a general mobilization," Brayton Harris, assistant director of Selective Service says, upping earlier government estimates by a month. Harris adds that Reagan's claim that registration will save no more than a week is based on outdated information. "We just did not have the numbers right in our initial guesses," he says.

Despite campaign promises to eliminate the program and continuing skepticism over its effectiveness, Reagan has avoided the issue since November 4, noting in an interview with The Crimson last week that political complications now make him hesitant to call off registration.

Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), Jimmy Carter's chief foe in the fight to reactivate registration, has urged Reagan to fulfill his promise, providing the president with memoranda describing the simple process of issuing an executive order rescinding the government's right to register young men.

Hatfield still believes the pressure of past promises and nightmares of federal prisons brimming with suburban high school seniors will persuade Reagan to axe registration. Citing the unenthusiastic testimony of Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger '38 before the Senate Armed Services Committee's recent hearings on registration, an aide to Hatfield says, "It really looks like they (members of the Reagan administration) are leaning in our direction."

But even in Hatfield's office, there seems to be little interest in forcing the registration issue. "Who knows, if we bring it up on the floor, (Sen. Sam) Nunn (D-Ga.) might push for a draft--that's what he wants anyway," says Hatfield's adviser, who fears "backing the president against the wall" by focusing too much attention on registration.

Nunn, a ranking member on the Armed Services panel, has shown no interest in rehashing the issue. He sticks to his argument that registration is a good step, and that a peacetime draft--perhaps into the reserves--may be needed in the future, but meanwhile a far more important goal is improving military personnel by increasing pay and benefits.

Most members of Congress, in the House as well as the Senate, fall somewhere between Hatfield and Nunn, but almost everyone shares their wait-and-see attitude.

"It looks like Reagan will try to improve the army by throwing money at its problems, making it more attractive for better people to stay in, before he even addresses registration," Bob Mills, chief staff aide to the Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee, says. "And Congress will only be too happy to let it ride till then," he adds.

Selective Service has not finished tallying the results of January's sign-up of men born in 1962, but Harris expects 98 per cent of the approximately 1.9 million eligible men to have registered. The program will continue for the rest of 1981, with men required to sign up as they turn 18.

How Kind

"We will let people sign up late, even from last summer's registration; we want names, not criminals," Harris says, adding, however, "eventually we will have to crack down."

At the Department of Justice, where government lawyers must decide how to track down and apprehend the approximately 40,000 men who did not sign up last summer, plus however many have not complied since then, spokesmen point to the White House and plead ignorance. "We have to wait for more information on how the president feels on the matter," one Justice Department spokesman said.

Harris says the Selective Service must wait until "the attorney general and his new players get settled in" before any progress is made on enforcement.

Philip B. Heymann, an assistant attorney general for 1978 through last month under Carter, now jokes that he worried about enforcing the registration law "for maybe five or seven minutes in 30 months" on the job.

As Sen. Harrison Schmitt (R-N.M.)--once an ardent foe of registration and now a passive supporter of the program--says matter-of-factly, "It's not exactly the burning issue it once was.