Open Thread for Night Owls: DADT
Posted by admin | Posted in Politics | Posted on 30-04-2010-05-2008
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On Monday, Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi : “It is the Speaker’s intention that a vote will be taken this year on [‘don’t ask, don’t tell’] in the House.”
On Wednesday, Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a foe of repealing DADT, wrote a letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, asking his views on the advisability of legislative action before the Pentagon completes its review of the policy.
On Friday, Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied in to Skelton. The short version: Congress should hold off on repeal until the review is completed, which means next year. Many people in the LGBTQ community and their allies have taken offense, as well they should.
issued the following response to Gates and Mullen:
“This letter from Secretary Gates is a significant cause for concern for those who truly respect and support the gay military community,” said Alexander Nicholson, a former U.S. Army interrogator who was discharged under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and who is the current Executive Director of Servicemembers United. “Several of the points in this letter are patently offensive and false, such as the claim that repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ would have a ‘direct impact for [troops] and their families’ or the suggestion that legislative action to repeal the law this year would ’send a very damaging message to our men and women in uniform that in essence their views, concerns, and perspectives do not matter.’”
For more than a year, Servicemembers United has been actively lobbying for a repeal plan that would respect the need of the Department of Defense to proceed in a thoughtful and measured way and to plan for repeal implementation in advance. The plan, which Servicemembers United released publicly in early February but which the White House has had since last spring, would allow for legislative repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” statute now but delay the effective date of full repeal until a pre-determined future point at which the Department of Defense is comfortable and ready for the change. This type of plan, referred to as a Set End-Date / Delayed Implementation plan, would accomplish both the goals of the President and the goals of the Pentagon without risking the lives and livelihoods of gay and lesbian troops by delaying legislative action.
Nicholson added, “If the White House and the Department of Defense had been more engaged with us and had communicated with us better about the alternatives available, Secretary Gates would surely not feel that legislative action this year would disrespect the opinions of the troops or negatively impact them and their families. This is partly a failure of the Administration to substantively engage the gay military community in a timely manner, and it remains unacceptable. The Commander-in-Chief should strongly and immediately speak out about the need to move swiftly and decisively on this issue for the sake of military readiness. It is, after all, as the President said, ‘the right thing to do.’”
Some critics are arguing that Gates’s letter has turned what was assumed to be a matter of “when” into a matter of “if.” In an email to Adam Bink, the White House said not so:
“The President’s commitment to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unequivocal. This is not a question of if, but how. That’s why we’ve said that the implementation of any congressional repeal will be delayed until the DOD study of how best to implement that repeal is completed. The President is committed to getting this done both soon and right.”
The first part of that email message is good to hear. And the second part would be OK if the White House follows Pelosi’s advice in this statement from her office:
“We all look forward to the report on the review of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy by the Defense Department. In the meantime, the Administration should immediately place a moratorium on dismissals under this policy until the review has been completed and Congress has acted.”
A moratorium is the approach many of us have argued for the past 16 months would be an acceptable interim measure until DADT is done away with. Better to dump this abhorrent policy now, of course. But at least a moratorium would protect gays and lesbians from being kicked out of the military until such time as the Pentagon’s report recommends how a permanent change of policy would best be implemented.
[h/t to Adam Bink at Open Left and John Aravosis at AMERICAblog]
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At Daily Kos on this date in :
And so it begins:
A conservative politico likely to work on the coming judicial nomination battle sends over a memo circulating on the right, which targets three likely Obama nominees: Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Judge Diane Wood, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan.
The early lines seem to be attacks on Kagan’s lack of bench experience, Sotomayor’s “temperament,” and Wood’s rulings on hot-button issues, including an application of a RICO statute in a case against hard-line anti-abortion activist Randall Terry.