He, of course, does not have to defend DADT, by any stretch of the imagination, but there you have it:
Finding itself in a strange legal position, the Obama administration filed an emergency request Wednesday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the military from allowing openly gay troops from serving.
In effect, the administration wants to continue barring gays from the military even though it ultimately favors repealing the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“They are in a very bizarre position, frankly of their own making,” said CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
[…]
The administration argued that changing it abruptly “risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute.”
B.S.
Toobin said the administration would like Congress to deal with the issue on a political level and doesn’t want the courts to take it on unilaterally.
Funny thing about having three co-equal branches of government: when two of them fall down on the job, it’s actually perfectly natural for the third to step in and get the job done.
The other day, The Rude Pundit actually laid out pretty succinctly, as he is wont to do, the best and politically smartest thing Obama could be doing at this point. Of course, as it is The Rude Pundit, it’s, um, kind of rude, but that’s the point. Obama should have said, in response to the injunction handed down against DADT:
“Groovy. The Senate can go fuck itself now. Let’s move on.”
Oh, but of course not. By the way, that entire Rude Pundit piece above is well worth the reading, just to alleviate the exasperation. His description of the 20% dead-enders who actually really oppose DADT is one of the most beautiful, spot-on analyses I’ve ever seen, by which I mean that it’s gloriously rude and to the point.
