Breakthrough Announced on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

In the culmination of today’s big push from activists to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the White House budget director, Peter Orszag, has written a (rather reluctant) letter to Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Penn.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to say that the Obama administration “supports [their] proposed amendment” to next year’s defense bill scrapping the 17-year old ban on open gay military service.

That clears the way for Lieberman to insert his amendment into the bill during the Senate Armed Services Committee’s mark-up on Wednesday. Murphy will do the same when the bill’s House counterpart goes up for a floor vote later this week. Their basic legislative fix: repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the legal sense, but allow the Defense Department to formally implement repeal after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ working group on repeal issues its report in December. That working group, chaired by Army Gen. Carter Ham and Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson, is soliciting opinion from around the uniformed military about how the details of repeal ought to work.

LGBT-rights groups are pretty much over the moon. A representative press release:

“This announcement from the White House today is long awaited, much needed, and immensely helpful as we enter a critical phase of the battle to repeal the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law,” said Alexander Nicholson, Executive Director of Servicemembers United and a former U.S. Army interrogator who was discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “We have been making the case to White House staff for more than a year now that delayed implementation is realistic, politically viable, and the only way to get the defense community on board with repeal, and we are glad to see the community and now the administration and defense leadership finally rally around this option.”