As an added part to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Defense budget, members debated and received testimony on a repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) supports a repeal. Ranking Member John McCain (R-AZ) does not.
At today’s hearing, the nation’s “top two Defense officials called for an end on Tuesday to the 16-year-old ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time in its history,” according to the New York Times.
“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal and professional belief that “allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”
But both Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the committee they needed more time to review how to carry out the change in policy, which requires an act of Congress, and predicted some disruption to the armed forces.
Meanwhile, POLITICO notes that Senator McCain “accused Defense Secretary Robert Gates of trying to usurp Congress’s authority over the military.”
“The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it,” Gates said in his opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee session. “We’ve received our orders from the commander in chief and are moving out accordingly.”
But McCain said Gates was disrespecting the statute Congress passed in 1993 setting the gays-in-the-military policy into law.
“I’m deeply disappointed with your statement, Secretary Gates,” McCain said. He charged Gates with treating repeal of the law as a fait accompli. “Your statement obviously is one that is clearly biased without the view of Congress being taken into consideration. … I’m happy to say that we still have a Congress of the United States to repeal ‘don’t ask don’t tell,’ despite your efforts to repeal it in many respects by fiat.”
Finally, the Washington Post looks at past statements by Senator McCain on the issue and sees a shift in his stance.
Three years ago, Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) was pretty clear about his stand on the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy.
A former war hero, McCain said he would support ending the ban once the military’s top brass told him they were okay with it.
"The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to," McCain told an audience of college students during the "Hardball" college tour on MSNBC.
(credit image – getty)
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