The thing is, they didn’t. Hunter and his fellow opponents of women in combat were wrongfooted when it turned out that support for integration is more solid than they thought, and his “gotcha amendment”—as one opponent on the committee termed it—passed. That, in theory, should have sent it and the larger bill on for a vote on the House floor. Meanwhile the same measure made it through the committee’s counterpart in the Senate, where it found surprisingly strong support, including from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It was an accidental victory of a progressive cause in the deeply conservative political territory of military policy due to the overreach of an opponent of that very cause. Then the mixture of political logic and parliamentary procedure started to get surreal.

Representative Thornberry, the committee’s chair, had a problem with the accidental result of his own committee’s vote to expand the draft registration—he told the Washington Post that he “didn’t probably do everything I should have” to make sure it lost in committee. But he was also unhappy with the fact that the vote took place at all. A House Armed Services Committee aide I spoke with said that Hunter and Thornberry had agreed that Hunter would propose the amendment to make a point and then offer to withdraw it before a vote—a sort of parliamentary ritual designed to let him register his opinion. But Hunter didn’t withdraw, and it sent Thornberry scrambling for legislatively murkier options for killing the measure before it could hit House floor, where it was predicted to pass.

The House Rules Committee, which reviews every bill that’s on its way to the floor, offered him a way out. But it wasn’t easy. Budget hawks in Congress have created a strict standing rule that if a cost-saving bill makes it out of committee, it can’t be changed in a way that makes it more expensive. Any expense has to be covered by a counterbalancing savings. And oddly enough, Hunter’s amendment to vastly expand a federal bureaucracy was going to save the federal government money, in a way liberals probably wouldn’t be overly keen on: Eligible Americans who fail to register for the Selective Service can’t get expensive federal services like Pell Grants, and enough people don’t register that the expansion was going to be a net-positive for the federal balance book.

In the end, Representative Pete Sessions, chair of the Rules Committee, engineered a solution. When Thornberry tried to undo the damage by introducing an amendment to the bill in the Rules Committee that would cancel out Hunter’s draft expansion, replacing it with a study examining the necessity of having a draft at all, Sessions was sympathetic to his fellow Texan’s cause. The chairman, wanting to protect “young women from being mandated to submit their personal information to the federal government to sign up for the selective service,” used the authority of his office to exploit a quirk of parliamentary procedure. So even though Thornberry’s amendment was voted down by the Rules Committee, Sessions wrote its language into the original language of the bill, which makes it “considered as adopted” by the Committee. Neat trick.