Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) introduced the stand-alone bill to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell yesterday (S.4022) and expects Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to Rule 14 the measure, a process under which the bill would circumvent the Senate Armed Services Committee and move to the floor of the Senate. Then, the big challenge for Reid will be to find the right time (or time at all) to bring it all to a vote, extending the session past Christmas if necessary.

At their hastily-arranged press-conference following yesterday’s failed vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Lieberman and Collins criticized Reid for filing cloture without first reaching an agreement on process and considering the tax compromise. Lieberman announced the stand-alone measure — which is currently co-sponsored by Collins, Gillibrand, Udall (CO) — and re-counted this conversation with Reid:

LIEBERMAN: I informed Senator Reid during the vote on this motion that we were going to do that, and he said, ‘same language as in the defense authorization bill?’ I said ‘yes.’ He said, ‘put me down as a co-sponsor.’ I said, ‘Harry, we’re going to ask you to bring this to a vote before the end of the lame duck session and he said, ‘I will bring it to the active calender under Rule 14.’

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If the Senate overcomes all of the procedural hurdles that lie ahead — Republicans can try to attach killer amendments, filibuster the motion to proceed as well the final bill — the measure should pass the House with ease. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday, “[a]n army of allies stands ready in the House to pass a standalone repeal of the discriminatory policy once the Senate acts.” Pelosi could presumably move on the measure within one legislative day. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs expressed the administration’s support this morning, stressing that “The president remains committed to seeing this repeal done before Congress leaves town this year.”

“And I think there could be legislative vehicles that start in the House as a stand-alone [repeal bill] and can withstand procedural hurdles and put the Senate on the record on an up or down vote to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Gibbs said and promised that Obama will remain engaged on the issue.

But repeal advocates will also be pursuing other avenues of action, from filing legal challenges against the policy to pressuring the President to use his stop-loss authority to end the discharges.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he was “disappointed” “but not surprised” by the Senate’s failure to proceed to the National Defense Authorization Act and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal amendment contained within it, and seemed to endorse Sens. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) and Susan Collins’ (R-ME) commitment to passing repeal as a stand-alone measure. “The fact remains, though, that there is still roughly a week left in the lame duck session, and so I would hope that the Congress would act to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ Gates said “If they are unable to do that, then as I’ve indicated in testimony and talking with you all, my greatest worry will be that then we are at the mercy of the courts and all of the lack of predictability that that entails.”

Gates described Judge Virginia Phillips’ injunction of DADT in October as a “wake-up call” that the law could be struck down immediately without giving the military time to prepare for the change:

GATES: I think that the wake-up call for us, certainly for me, was the decision by the district court judge in California in October, who basically said, on a global basis, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is struck down immediately. So for all practical purposes, from that moment forward we had — the law was no longer in effect and we had done no training, no preparation. And we weren’t 100-percent sure that the Ninth Circuit would give us a stay. And so there was a two-week period there where there was an enormous amount of uncertainty as the courts went back and forth.

The proceedings of the Witt case are a concern. This is one that we have worried about because in that, as I understand it — and I’m getting into legal territory here that I may not fully understand, but my recollection is that we were faced with a situation where if the court decision stood, we would have a different set of criteria in terms of applying “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit and we would have had elsewhere in the country, so, again, the potential for extraordinary confusion.

Gates comments are telling because they pinpoint the moment at which the Secretary flipped from slow-walking the repealing process to running with it and publicly calling on the Senate to lift the ban in the lame duck. The good news is that since the Secretary’s major concern is having enough time to implement repeal, he may prove an important ally to pushing the stand alone bill through Congress and if that fails, pressuring President Obama to use his executive authority and issue some kind of stop-loss that would be more respectful of the military’s preparation concerns.

Of course, if all these efforts fall short, then the policy will probably be overturned by the courts — which, as some advocates told me, is not necessarily a bad thing, since it would prevent DOD from stretching out the implementation process.