Following Thursday’s Senate defeat of the effort to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Pentagon will continue to do what it has been doing for the past 17 years. It will keep on enforcing a ban on openly gay men and women serving in the military, although with considerably less ardor than in years past, Pentagon officials say. Nonetheless, the defeat stands as a sharp GOP rebuke to President Obama, who pledged to fight the ban as a candidate, as well as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who support letting openly gay men and women serve in uniform.
Over the past year, Gates has imposed several conditions on discharging gays that has reduced such ousters dramatically. And Senate proponents of lifting the ban held out hope, however scant, that a stand-alone bill to end the ban could come to the Senate floor in coming days and ultimately prevail. Gay advocates planned a rally for mid-day Friday near the Capitol to urge repeal.
But whether on the battlefield or in the courtroom, one thing any fighting force abhors is uncertainty. In recent weeks, Gates has cited a court’s decision to throw out the gay ban as the worst way to change the law. “My greatest worry will be that then we are at the mercy of the courts and all the lack of predictability that that entails,” he said Friday. Instead of detailed briefings and training sessions rolled out over a span of months to accompany the change, the military might be forced to grapple with issues involving barracks and benefits for gay military personnel overnight.
When Virginia Phillips, a federal district court judge in California ruled the law unconstitutional in September, the Pentagon flip-flopped on its enforcement as higher courts upheld or reversed the decision pending an appeal (her ruling is currently on hold). The decision surprised many court-watchers, because for years the federal judiciary has let the U.S. military runs its own operations without interference. While the California ruling was contrary to that notion, it’s likely that any judicial decision finding “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” illegal would be reversed by the Supreme Court and its reverence for deference to the military.
While the Pentagon didn’t initially react to the Senate vote, gay advocacy groups were not so restrained. “A band of senators voted to continue the discrimination against gay and lesbian service members who are fighting and dying for our country,” Trevor Thomas of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said. “This continued delay is an outrage against these service members and the more than 14,000 who have already lost their jobs under this discriminatory law.” Supporters of repeal could not get the 60 votes they needed Thursday to press ahead with a bill that would have allowed repeal, falling short in a 57-40 vote.
A recent Pentagon survey found that 70 percent of military personnel said allowing gays to serve openly would have positive, mixed or no impact on the nation’s combat capabilities. But up to 60 percent of those in front-line units said letting openly gay men into their units would hurt their morale and combat readiness.
In Thursday’s vote, the GOP did not have the 51 votes needed to strip the repeal proposal from the defense bill. But they were able to corral enough votes to block consideration of the entire defense bill. The 57-40 procedural vote was three short of the 60 needed move to debate on the overall defense bill — and the gay ban. Not only does the vote spell the end for trying to lift the ban any time soon — next year’s GOP-controlled House will be less hospitable to such a change — but it also means the Pentagon will probably be funded under a “continuing resolution” that simply continues current spending levels. It has been 48 years since Congress failed to pass a military spending bill.
President Obama said he was “extremely disappointed” by the vote. “This law weakens our national security, diminishes our military readiness, and violates fundamental American principles of fairness, integrity and equality,” he said in a statement, adding that he hopes the Senate will take up the issue again before adjourning for the year.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, was trying to do just that. He was planning, along with colleagues, to introduce a free-standing bill repealing the law that he hoped to bring to the floor in the current lame duck session. The Connecticut independent acknowledged the gambit is a long shot — opponents could filibuster the measure – but he that “as far as the efforts to repeal `Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it ain’t over.”