Lame duck sessions of Congress typically serve as opportunities for low-profile pieces of legislation to become law—a time for various loose ends to get tied up. Nothing could be farther from the case for the current Congress however. With just a few weeks before the 111th Congress draws to a close, the outcome of several critical pieces of legislation remains to be seen.
Making the situation all the more difficult is, frankly, the hubris of Congressional Republicans who, riding a high off of their victories this November, have since chosen a path of bullish obstructionism.
The fault for, if not the bulk of, this dilemma rests with Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration, which waited until the midterm elections were over to begin legislating on these important issues. Yet, regardless of culpability, it remains essential that our representatives—the people we have sent to Washington to govern—begin to actually govern.
One such issue relates to Section 654 of Title 10 of the United States Code, known as the "Policy concerning homosexuality in the armed forces," more commonly referred to as Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). Despite having made a key campaign promise to his party base that the law would be repealed while he was in office, Obama has yet to actually effect such change. Instead, the Pentagon has taken slow and bureaucratic measures to survey what would be the impact of allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly.
The survey was peculiar in the first place, largely because the military traditionally has not been asked for its input on policy changes. Not entirely unrelated was the fact that the report allowed the Obama administration to stall its repeal of the policy until after the midterm elections when fallout could be minimized.
In any case, the survey was issued and the results tallied. Released on Tuesday, the Pentagon report revealed a substantive majority of service members, particularly those who thought they had already served with a gay or lesbian soldier, believed that repealing the policy would have either a mixed or a positive result.
To be sure, there were many respondents who did state that repealing DADT would be detrimental for the military. Of these personnel, some said they felt gay and lesbian soldiers were incapable of controlling their sexual urges and would proceed to have sex with—or attempt to have sex with—every member of their battalion if allowed to acknowledge their sexual orientation openly.
Fear that gay and lesbian soldiers would change the culture of the military was also a typical concern: The report released with the survey noted that several respondents feared rainbow flags would become standard issue for military uniforms.
Yet overall, the majority of heterosexual soldiers accept DADT repeal for various reasons, including what the Pentagon report labeled as the "This Is America" argument. Essentially, soldiers in support of the repeal believe that the values they are fighting for—and in some cases giving their lives for—were meant to protect people's right to freedom and equality. DADT violates American values and principles in egregious ways, and that's something the majority of servicemen and women, as well as the vast majority of the general public, agree on.
Surprisingly, however, a repeal of DADT seems unlikely. While some Republicans in the Senate, such as Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), are in favor of repeal—though not without the inclusion of amendments that would slow down the process—the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, John McCain (R-AZ), has made it his personal goal to hinder repeal no matter how wrong and out of touch his position is. Democrats in the Senate have varying opinions on the issue as well, with some more conservative members opposing repeal and the Democratic leadership currently tied up trying to push Obama's agenda on various other policies.
Indeed, DADT repeal is only one of several critical issues currently waiting some sort of action by Congress. The Dream Act, a crucial piece of immigration legislation, is also at an impasse in Congress. The act is designed to provide citizenship for resident aliens who came to the United States illegally as children but have done well in school and wish to become eligible for government sponsored college scholarships. The radical fringes of the Republican Party maintain that such legislation will encourage illegal immigration. The solution advocated by these Republicans is simple: deportation.
Yet in the meantime, these children are to languish and hang around inner-city neighborhoods where the only jobs to be had are offered by drug dealers.
Those who don't believe such a dynamic makes for good policy, however, will very likely be out of luck since the Obama administration waited until after the elections to handle the issue. The administration's unwillingness to utter the phrase "illegal immigration" has forced Congressional politicians to figure out a way to pass this substantive change to public policy in a just a few weeks.
For their part, Republicans are proving uncharacteristically ornery. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Republican Senate minority leader, has made it clear that no debate will be held on any issues in the lame duck session unless the Bush tax cuts are first made permanent. For McConnell, important legislative issues like equality for gay soldiers and educational aid to disadvantaged minorities will simply have to wait.
While many Republicans, and Americans, believe that the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent and are essential to revitalizing the economy, accomplishing such a task does not have to be done at the cost of other equally important pieces of legislation.
Clearly, both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for the present political and legislative predicament. It is imperative that politicians in both parties remember that the point of an election is not to award bragging rights or issue special lapel pins to members of Congress.
Elections mean that Americans expect their legislators to legislate, and it's time to get to work.