Yet another DADT post

I’ve gone back and forth a lot on my feeling about the repeal (or lack thereof) of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  I’ve been very sympathetic to the arguments that it makes some sense to go slow if it comes with the reward of reducing the salience of the issue when repeal actually happens.  However, that case rather depended on this actually getting done by the end of 2010.  Sadly, that appears to be pretty much off the table at this point.

Elsewhere, I’m also sympathetic to the argument that the Administration had good reason to appeal the District Court ruling that said DADT was unconstitutional.  I’m not tremendously sympathetic to efforts to defer all constitutional interpretation to the judicial branch (on the whole I think our political branches ought to take a substantially larger role for themselves in the interpretation and defense of the constitution.  c.f. – Robin West, Mark Tushnet, etc.), and letting the Circuit Court decision is kind of a world case version of that.  I really don’t like the idea that future executives should feel free to cherry pick individual Circuit Court decisions that they happen to politically support and allowing them to stand.

Somewhat related: I think there is a plausible case that there is important precedent at stake here on the matter of judicial deference re: military matters.  I don’t actually AGREE with that case (this is the flip side of my point above.  I don’t like the attempts by political actors to pretend that they have no role in constitutional interpretation – and I don’t like the attempts by the judicial branch to mark off major sections of law as beyond their purvey simply because they happen to involve the military), but I understand why it might matter a lot to the administration.  And I’d forgive them  this if I thought there was a strong case that legislative rollback was coming soon.

But…that doesn’t really seem to be the case.

I’ve said a lot in the past couple years defending Obama and his administration against attacks from the left.  I will continue to do that.  I think they’ve, on the whole, done a pretty good job.  But this is one place I’m feeling increasingly willing to call this out as a massive blunder.

Basically, I agree with Scott Lemieux (in his agreement with Yglesias and Drum) that while the Republicans should hold the lion’s share of the blame for their efforts to preserve bigotry and retrograde cultural attitudes, there’s plenty of anger worth directing at the Democrats here:

This puts all of the direct blame on Republicans, who deserve at least 90% of the blame in any case.  But this still doesn’t explain why the Democrats are pre-emptively capitulating on an issue on which they hold the political leverage. As Matt says, filibustering defense appropriations bills is unpopular, and DADT is unpopular. Certainly, if the shoe was on the other foot McConnell would force the Dems to filibuster multiple times and put intense pressure on the moderates. It’s entirely possible that there’s nothing Reid can do to get “moderate” Republican frauds to do the right thing, but at least Dems  could get a political victory out of it.   By just surrendering when they hold the political cards, the Democratic leadership must bear some responsibility for the circular firing squad.