I've only been covering politics for a few years. So while I've witnessed a number of sad political moments -- like Congress voting to go to war in Iraq with only six senators having actually read the NIE beforehand -- the Senate's failure to repeal the ban on allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly has to be the most pathetic, embarrassing political moment I've ever covered.
It's not immediately clear what happened -- Majority Leader Harry Reid brought the bill to the floor over the objections of Sen. Susan Collins, who appeared to believe that there was a plan to vote on the bill later. Collins ultimately voted for cloture, but several Republicans who had indicated a willingness to vote yes -- Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, John Ensign, Lisa Murkowski, and Democrat Scott Manchin -- voted no. So the cloture vote failed 57-40. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who was furiously working the floor in a futile effort to get to 60 votes, has announced he and Collins will offer a free-standing DADT repeal bill -- which will have to make it through both houses from scratch.
More than 60 senators, enough to overcome a filibuster, agreed DADT should end. Military leadership has endorsed repeal. Volumes of empirical evidence, including the Pentagon's own study and the experiences of the U.S.'s own military allies, show that ending the policy would offer minimal risk of disruption. Yet the vote fell short anyway.
This is not 1964, with Sen. Richard Russell filibustering the Civil Rights Act in a losing attempt to preserve Jim Crow. Sen. Brown, who voted no, said last week that "I have visited our injured troops at Walter Reed and have attended funerals of our fallen heroes. When a soldier answers the call to serve, and risks life or limb, it has never mattered to me whether they are gay or straight. My only concern has been whether their service and sacrifice is with pride and honor." Brown did not vote no today because he thinks that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to serve openly. Brown voted no because of mere procedural objections about when the vote should be taken. The message Brown sent today is that whether a soldier serves with distinction and honor is actually secondary to the procedural niceties of the U.S. Senate.
I once asked a service member who had been deployed to Iraq what she thought about DADT. She recounted how a member of her unit had asked my friend to inform her partner and child in the event that she did not make it home. For obvious reasons, this woman had to hide the existence of her family from the service. At this point she was choking back tears -- both because of the thought of losing her friend, and the depth of the responsibility she had been asked to take on. Gay and lesbian soldiers will not stop fighting and dying on foreign battlefields all over the planet as a result of this vote. They will simply do so in secret.
At least an old-timey segregationist Russell was committed to a principle, albeit a twisted one. The senators who voted against cloture were merely concerned about procedure. But make not mistake, they made an affirmative decision today. They voted for something. Those who voted to prevent a final vote on the Defense Authorization Act claim to honor the sacrifices of America's service members while demanding they bleed to death in the closet. They voted to ensure that the partners and families of those who have committed to giving their lives in service to this country receive no recognition, financial or otherwise, of what they have lost.
There may still be time for the Senate to redeem itself from this one, truly disgraceful moment. But the fact that so many senators were willing to sacrifice something as fundamental as equal treatment for gay and lesbian service members on the altar of "procedure" should not be forgotten. And as long as the filibuster exists, this kind of thing will keep happening.
