Best (shocking considering the source) explanation I've seen on what the White House and Pentagon plan is to repeal DADT and how the various lawsuits progressed and the Government dealt with them.
President Obama’s go-slow approach on DADT backfires
In 1993, President Bill Clinton nearly derailed his presidency with an early move to end the military’s ban on gay service members. Aides scrambled to craft the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a compromise to get the politically radioactive issue off the new administration’s back.
President Barack Obama’s aides were intent, above all else, on not repeating that experience when it came to carrying out their campaign promise to open up the military to gays, so they moved cautiously.
Obama’s current predicament is a result of a collision between a go-slow White House strategy that deferred to Pentagon and military leaders on the pace of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the progress of a stuttering federal lawsuit that a small group of gay Republicans filed more than six years ago.
The Obama White House, led in large part by Clinton veteran Rahm Emanuel, sought to avoid a showdown with the military over the issue. Particularly as Obama, a relative neophyte on national security, faced critical decisions on Iran and Afghanistan, he didn’t want the process derailed by the culturally freighted gays-in-the-military fight.
“The part of this that was smart was that they figured the only way to get this done was to get the Pentagon’s buy-in. That is informed by the Clinton experience,” Socarides said. “You cannot outsmart the Pentagon on this kind of thing.”
“The deal we understand was made between Obama and Gates was that it would be a two-year process,” said one gay rights activist who talks regularly with White House officials and asked not to be identified. The go-slow strategy played out in court as well. In May 2009, the Obama administration faced a decision about whether to ask the Supreme Court to take up a 9th Circuit ruling that sharply limited the Pentagon’s ability to discharge gay service members. The court’s opinion in the case brought by Air Force Maj. Margaret Witt was clearly at odds with a 2008 ruling from the 1st Circuit that upheld “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The Witt case could have produced a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of “don’t ask,” but the case could also have put Solicitor General Elena Kagan in the exceedingly uncomfortable position of arguing in the nation’s highest court in favor of a statute that she once excoriated as “a moral injustice of the highest order.”
A ruling against the law would have shut down the political battle over DADT, but one in favor of it could have aided those seeking to preserve the status quo.
In the end, the Justice Department balked, allowing Witt’s case to return to the trial court.
During Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings earlier this year, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) grilled her over the issue. He later said her claim that delaying an appeal was tactically advantageous to preserving the DADT law was “wholly unsatisfactory.”
-snip-
The White House’s Plan A involved a Pentagon study for release in December 2010, followed by legislation thereafter. But in May, advocates won the White House’s public support for conditional repeal legislation that attempted to work around the next-Congress problem by giving Obama, the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs power to end the policy when the studies were complete.
Even that contingent plan was awkward for the White House, since it upended Obama’s initial agreement with Gates, who faces service chiefs staunchly opposed to repeal. “It started getting real messy,” said one person close to the talks. “The president was in a very tough spot.”Gates eventually issued a terse statement saying he still favored waiting on legislation but viewed the conditional repeal as an acceptable fallback if Congress was intent on acting.
-snip-
During the little-noticed trial in July in Riverside, Calif., the government called no witnesses, insisting that Congress’s publicly stated rationales for writing “don’t ask” into law in 1993 were legally sufficient to sustain the statute 17 years later.
Some conservatives said the Justice Department was, in essence, taking a dive. “Why did DOJ fail to put on any real defense? Why did it refuse, for example, to call as witnesses some of the military leaders who continue to support DADT?” asked Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“DOJ has been doing what it can to sabotage the policy.” On Sept. 9, Phillips ruled “don’t ask” unconstitutional, relying in large part on the legal standard set forth in the 9th Circuit’s Witt case — the same one the Obama administration declined to challenge last year.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43708.html#ixzz12fMvO8r8Go read the entire article - lots of details - including on the pace and timing of the court cases.
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