DADT repeal may finally be dead after Senate majority leader Harry Reid set a floor calendar for this week that left no room for debate of the defense authorization bill.
I have to level with you — “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal is most likely dead. Goodness knows, I hope to be wrong, but nothing short of a December-induced miracle on 34th Street could resurrect it now.
Of course, no one in Washington is going to come right out and say it because business here is done within a complicated strata of subterfuge that’s rarely decipherable to outsiders. But there hasn’t been so much as a single smoke signal suggesting that the White House or the Democratic leadership has the will to push repeal through.
The near-final nail in the coffin was delivered by Senate majority leader Harry Reid over the weekend when he announced the floor schedule for the week of December 6: nothing Monday, on Tuesday/Wednesday an impeachment trial of a federal judge from Louisiana, with the first votes of the week likely to come on Thursday.
Once the impeachment is a wrap, Reid noted that left “a pretty clear path” to what else needed to be addressed – tax cuts, a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty plus votes on some other extraneous bills, one of which included the DREAM Act.
Reid said the schedule should leave the Senate “ample time” to complete those priorities and that they hoped to adjourn on December 17.
"That's the plan, we hope we can execute it," he said with an air of finality from the Senate floor Saturday.
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin — perhaps slightly dismayed at no mention of the National Defense Authorization Act — prodded Reid to “say something about the Defense bill.”
Oh yeah ... that. “We’re also trying to figure out a time to move forward on the defense authorization bill,” Reid added, along with offering some minutiae about process and time being too scarce to debate the bill without putting limitations on the number of amendments and length of debate. (Gay.Americablog.com has the full video here if you're feeling super-wonky.)
But as I see it, what Reid said after being prompted by Levin is beside the point. The majority leader laid out the must-gets and they line up perfectly with what the White House has been pushing as its lead lame-duck items for the past couple months: extending the middle-class tax cuts and passing START. Press secretary Robert Gibbs has continually pounded these two points home in the White House briefings, rarely mentioning the defense authorization bill unless responding to a direct question about the policy. And a listing of White House talking points that was distributed to Congress members after last week’s bipartisan meeting made no mention of the National Defense Authorization Act. But guess what was mentioned? START and taxes.
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