As the legislative push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” switched into high gear this week, the pressure point between Congress and the Department of Defense was brought into sharp relief — revealing what is shaping up to be a game of chicken over whether to take legislative action this year.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s introduction of what he rightly called “the first serious attempt since 1993 to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in the Senate” was a giant leap forward in the march toward overturning the gay ban. Perhaps as important was the fact that Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, cosponsored the bill — only the second time he has ever signed on to a bill being considered before his committee, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

During Wednesday’s introduction, Levin left no doubt that he is solidly behind Lieberman’s push and aiming for full repeal, not simply a moratorium on discharges — that’s plan B.

“The main effort’s going to be to repeal if the votes are there — I hope they will be,” Levin told reporters. “But if that’s not available right now, then we would, at our markup, try to see if we can’t get enough votes at least to suspend the discharges during this period.”

Levin specifically noted that his committee's markup of the defense authorization legislation in mid May — when the details of the base bill will be hashed out in committee — would be “the best chance we would have of success” at passing either repeal or a moratorium. Bottom line, if the defense funding bill passes out of committee with a repeal measure in place, the onus will be on opponents of repeal to strip it out on the Senate floor.

But just two hours later, the House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee took first crack at questioning the three-person panel that will be conducting the Pentagon’s yearlong study of repeal, which is due at the beginning of December.

The co-chairs of the working group, Jeh Johnson, the Obama-appointed chief legal counsel for the DOD, and Gen. Carter Ham, took turns telling the committee that they believed Congress would want to be “informed” by their work — the implication being that it shouldn’t act until the review had been completed.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, chief sponsor of the House’s repeal legislation, was completely undeterred by the testimony. His bill now has 189 cosponsors and another two dozen verbal commitments, putting repeal within striking distance in the House.



“We have the votes in the House,” he said after the hearing. “We are going to get this thing done this year — I don’t care if it’s a stand-alone bill, attached to the National Defense Authorization Act or any other piece of legislation. But this will be changed this year.”