Draft Registration Now Automatic

The federal government just automated Selective Service registration, and almost nobody noticed.

Driving the news: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs proposed a rule implementing a provision from December's National Defense Authorization Act that would automatically register all men aged 18–26 for the draft. No form to fill out. No trip to the post office. You're in.

Catch up quick:

• The U.S. and Iran reached a ceasefire last week, but Trump has not ruled out a ground invasion and has imposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz
• Trump has also publicly floated military operations involving Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and Canada
• There is no active draft, but the infrastructure is being quietly expanded and streamlined

The legal question: Is the draft even constitutional? Supreme Court precedent says yes—the Selective Draft Law Cases (1918) upheld conscription. But that ruling leaned heavily on sovereignty theory and foreign examples rather than the constitutional text or founding-era history. It's the kind of opinion the Roberts court has shown little patience for when it conflicts with history and tradition analysis.

The founders didn't draft anyone. There was no national conscription at the founding. What existed were state-controlled local militias—part-time, community-based, not designed for extended foreign campaigns. The founders were explicitly suspicious of standing armies. Congress has to reauthorize Army funding every two years precisely because of that suspicion. When Secretary of War James Monroe proposed a national draft during the War of 1812, Rep. Daniel Webster called it unconstitutional on its face and warned it would fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state.

Flashback: The Civil War produced the first actual federal draft—and Chief Justice Roger Taney drafted an opinion concluding it exceeded Congress's powers, arguing that the authority to "raise" an army did not include the power to compel service in it. No case reached the Supreme Court. That constitutional question was never litigated to resolution.

The intrigue: The court's post-Dobbs framework cuts both ways here. Dobbs weakened stare decisis for decisions that lack historical grounding—and Justice Alito wrote explicitly that precedents can be overturned when they are "egregiously wrong." The 1918 draft ruling fits that description better than most. If history and tradition govern unenumerated rights, they should govern unenumerated federal powers at least as strictly.

The 13th Amendment angle adds a second problem the 1918 court mostly sidestepped. Abolishing involuntary servitude "except as punishment for a crime" would seem, on plain reading, to prohibit compelling military service under threat of imprisonment. The Selective Draft Law Cases dispatched this in a few sentences without serious engagement.

What to watch: Whether any legal organization challenges the auto-registration rule before it takes effect—and whether a future draft call, if it comes, produces a case the Supreme Court is willing to take seriously under its own modern framework. The constitutional infrastructure for a challenge exists. The political will to file it is another question.

The bottom line: The last time a young man could be compelled at gunpoint to fight a war he didn't choose, the Supreme Court signed off on it with a shrug. The court has since built an entire jurisprudence demanding historical justification for government power. Whether it will apply that framework to conscription—or carve out a permanent exception for the government's most extreme claim over a citizen's body and life—is now a live question.