Senate Panel Alters Registration Bill

A Senate committee voted yesterday to ask men who register for the draft whether or not they are conscientious objectors, a move that may delay efforts to begin registering 19- and 20- year-old men.

On a 13-11 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the amendment, which calls for a question in all registration forms asking men if they would try to avoid induction by claiming to be conscientious objectors.

If the Senate passes the bill as amended, it will force the proposal into a House-Senate conference committee, where a compromise version will be worked out.

Delaying Tactics

The House, which approved the registration proposal last month, will then be forced to reconsider the bill in its altered form.

Capitol Hill sources said yesterday Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) introduced the amendment to force the House to vote again on the measure.

"The President wants to start registering in two weeks," a staff member of the Appropriations Committee said yesterday, adding, "He's not even going to have a bill for two or three weeks."

Hatfield feels he can rally the necessary votes in the House to overturn its previous vote, sources added. The House passed the proposal, which calls for a $13.3-million budgetary transfer to register men born in 1960 and 1961 and upgrade Selective Service System facilities, by a margin of 30 votes.

Hatfield plans to introduce at least two more amendments in the committee which meets again today, to delay Senate consideration of the measure, sources said.

At yesterday's meeting, the committee considered only Hatfield's amendment. The session, which followed several fruitless meetings last week when the panel could not draw a quorum, lasted for 30 minutes, with Hatfield and Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.) squaring off in the committee room.

Stennis held the proxy votes of most of the conservative senators while the balance of the committee's members ran back and forth to the Senate floor to vote on budget resolutions.

The Oregon senator, who has promised to filibuster the proposal to death when it reaches the Senate floor, will introduce an amendment asking for women to be registered along with men, Rick Rolf, an aide to Hatfield, said last night.

Two House committees earlier this spring voted down proposals to include women in the draft. The American Civil Liberties Union has promised to take President Carter to court should he sign a bill asking for male-only registration.

Should a registration proposal be passed and signed into law, men born in 1960 and 1961 would be required to go to their local post offices to fill out registration forms. In the even of a military emergency, the government would conduct a lottery to determine the order of induction.