While Donald Trump was announcing his pick of Gen. James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, the Obama administration was throwing a last minute sop to feminists and liberals.

On Thursday, the White House announced its support for requiring women to register for the draft.

“As old barriers for military service are being removed, the administration supports — as a logical next step — women registering for the Selective Service,” said Ned Price, spokesman for the National Security Council. A Pentagon spokesman, speaking on behalf of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, said, “While Secretary Carter strongly supports our all-volunteer approach and does not advocate returning to a draft, as he has said in the past, he thinks it makes sense for women to register for selective service just as men must.”

In reality, however, Obama and Co. are spitting in the wind. Since we’re entering the last few weeks of Obama’s presidency, this action is mostly symbolic. To actually enact this mandate, the Republican Congress would need to alter current draft laws, and there is little support for such an action, especially since that body had already stripped the current National Defense Authorization Act of a women’s draft provision.

And feminists?

The feminist website Jezebel called the GOP response to this toothless proposal “general sexist panic,” but showed its own angst: “Women would not be forced to serve unless in the event of a national emergency, like another world war. While that thought is reassuring for now, thinking about the situations we might find ourselves in a few years down the road under a new administration is sobering.”

Apparently the commitment to equality ends at the door of a Selective Service office.

These women — or should I say, womyn — needn’t worry their eternally apoplectic heads about a Trump administration forcing them to pick up one of those nasty guns. Gen. Mattis is old school on the idea of women serving in combat roles. Forget the debate over whether or not women can perform physically — Mattis has serious concerns about whether women would be suited for “intimate killing.” “The problem is that in the atavistic primate world the idea of putting women in there is not setting them up for success,” he has said. He also has concerns about male commanders hesitating to send women into combat.

And then there’s that issue of sexual attraction of young men and women in close quarters, placing “healthy young men and women together and we expect them to act like little saints.” Mattis, the intellectual “Warrior Monk,” states, “I don’t care if you go anywhere in history where you would find that this has worked.”

So if this effort to enforce a draft for women is a moot point, why is Obama doing this? Is it one last progressive hurrah? Or is the administration trying to trip up Mattis’s confirmation hearings? After all, it was Obama who fired Mattis as head of Central Command in 2013 — without even the courtesy of a phone call. Mattis and Obama were at odds on Iran.

For now, it doesn’t look like Obama and his fellow Democrats will get the power to force young women to register for the draft. But we also see that in the waning days of his presidency, Obama isn’t willing to take his final curtain call without throwing whatever barriers he can in the path of a new administration.