According to news reports, the Justice Department is preparing to ask a federal judge to stay her ruling ending enforcement of the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy banning gays in the military. But my sources insist that, as of last night, the White House, meaning President Obama, had not signed off on that course of action even though the Justice Department sent the White House a legal brief in near-record time.
Perhaps the decision has been made by now, but the last time I checked, senior officials were still debating both what to do and how to do it, cognizant that an appeal of the ruling could turn the party's activist base from petulant to pissed off in a matter of seconds.
And of course, the DoJ has filed for a stay, noting its intent to appeal, and it has, in fact, pissed off the base.
The other analysis, not so sympathetic, is from Andrew Sullivan:
What they're saying is both that retaining the ban hurts "military readiness, combat effectiveness, unit cohesion, morale, good order, discipline, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces" and that precipitously ending the ban hurts "military readiness, combat effectiveness, unit cohesion, morale, good order, discipline, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces."
That's the exquisite knot they have tied themselves into. And it might work, I suppose, if the orderly process was inevitable. But it seems pretty clear to me isn't. The Senate has filibustered this once in a Democratic majority session. What are the odds that, using exactly these Obama arguments about "morale" and "unit cohesion", the GOP will not filibuster again in a lame-duck session even if the military top brass give the go-ahead? I have little doubt there will be enough resistance in the report itself to give the GOP a reason to keep the ban alive.
You have to wonder how someone who manages to get elected president can paint hiimself into a corner like this.
Here's the filing:
DOJ Request for Stay of DADT Injunction
I'm not convinced that the Pentagon is doing anything but kicking and screaming, but it starts to look as though even the kicking and screaming is not uniform, as witness the memo from the JAG yesterday.
I really wish I could think that Obama has some sort of master plan -- besides "Let Congress do it." Sullivan points up where we've been with that strategy so far, and the Democrats are going to lose seats in November. (I remain convinced that the "study" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It's completely unnecessary.) Obama's inconsistency of defending laws is too well-documented for me to comment on it further.
I'm too pragmatic to have a lot of patience with Obama's focus on "process." Is it better to have DADT repealed legislatively? In theory, that's the way it should work, I guess. But laws can be changed. Court rulings are harder. And legislators don't pay a lot of attention to constitutional issues when they're passing discriminatory laws. The courts have to.
I find this statement interesting (from the NYT article linked above):
In his declaration, Mr. Stanley discussed those efforts. He argued that ending the policy would require training of military service members, as well as a reworking of dozens of policies and regulations involving issues like “housing, benefits, re-accession, military equal opportunity, anti-harassment, standards of conduct, rights and obligations of the chaplain corps, and others.”
“Amending these regulations would typically take several months,” he said. “To change all of the implicated policies and underlying regulations will require a massive undertaking by the department and cannot be done overnight.”
One: how inefficient is the military, by the way? Two: how deeply embedded in the regulations is homophobia?
Update:
Just found this post by Amanda Marcotte that pretty much reflects my own thinking.
So, are they arrogant or stupid in thinking this brilliant “let the Senate do it instead of simply instructing the Justice Department to let it go”? The one thing they need to understand is the longer they let this question linger, the more option #3 seems possible---that the Obama administration is homophobic and actually supports DADT, despite their protests.
Take, for instance, Valerie Jarrett calling a gay teenager’s orientation a “lifestyle choice”. (She’s since apologized.) That’s not the sort of thing that’s going to quell suspicions that the administration is doing the wrong thing by gay people because of some procedural bullshit but because they don’t like gay people. What it’s going to do is ramp up suspicions that they don’t give a shit how this actually affects the fighting men and women in uniform who have to live lies, because they think that all you have to do to avoid DADT is to choose a different “lifestyle”.
Just remember this, when the administration is making excuses: just because the Justice Department doesn’t pursue this case doesn’t mean the Senate can’t go ahead and codify the federal judge’s decision into law.
And so does Rachel Maddow's commentary:
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I'm so sick of this bullshit.
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