Advocates of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t tell have long targeted Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) as a possible swing vote on overturning the policy and Lugar’s office had been telling me that the Senator was “leaning” towards supporting the measure if it came up for a vote under a fair process and after the New START treaty. But on Thursday, the Senator joined 38 other Republicans in voting against a motion to proceed to the measure.

Now, with the stand-alone repeal measure reaching 40 co-sponsors in the Senate, Lugar’s office has confirmed to me that the Senator is “sympathetic” to the new DADT repeal legislation and may be willing to vote for the measure if it is brought up under a “fair” process and voted on after START.

Lugar first announced his qualified endorsement Sunday night, after a speech at Marian University in Indianapolis, Indiana, in response to a student’s question about the policy. This afternoon, Lugar spokesperson Mark Helmke reiterated that the Senator’s vote would still depend on how the measure is brought up. Helmke also said that Lugar was willing to stay past Christmas to end the policy before the end of the year.

This afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs refused to say that President Obama would call on the Senate to stay in session until it brought up the stand-alone measure to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In a series of passive replies to the Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson and the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld, Gibbs didn’t directly urge the Senate to consider the measure, but said, “our hope is that the Senate will take this up again and we’ll see this done by the time the year ends.” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DREAM, along with government funding, are all in a basket of issues that are likely to come after” START, he argued earlier in the press briefing.

Asked by Eleveld why Obama has pledged to stay in DC until the Senate passed START but not DADT, Gibbs replied that the President would wait for the Senate to adjourn before leaving. Gibbs also refused to say if the administration was considering alternatives to legislative repeal:

GIBBS: There is a whole host of important things, beyond the tax deal and START, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell being one of them, that the President believes can be dealt with before Congress leaves town.

ELEVELD: If the legislative effort fails, are there other options on the table? I mean it’s a distinct possibility now.

GIBBS: I should say this, I think it’s a distinct possibility that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed by the end of this year and that’s where our effort is focused.

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While the administration isn’t publicly discussing other ways to end the ban, repeal advocates are. This morning, three former service members discharged under the policy filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California asking the court to “reinstate them on the basis of the ‘Witt standard,’ a legal threshold established by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 2008.”

On Sunday, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) called on Obama to use his bully pulpit “and urge the Senate to stay in, right up to New Years.” “That’s the problem that I don’t see that kind of a willingness to fight that hard, where he will take that kind of a position and that’s what’s necessary,” Levin said. “The Senate and the House, these are tests of wills.”

Appearing on CSPAN’s Newsmakers this Sunday, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) reiterated his pledge to stay in session after Christmas to give the Senate more time to consider end of year priorities like extending tax breaks for the middle class and passing the stand-alone Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal measure recently introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME). Levin also called on President Obama to use his bully pulpit to keep the Senate in town past the holidays, but lamented that he hasn’t seen “that kind of a willingness to fight that hard” from Obama:

LEVIN: One of the questions will be whether we stay long enough to get some of these things done and I hope we stay as long as we need. There are many days extra if we stay after Christmas, it adds a few days. It would add a few days, for instance, if we stayed in the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday before Christmas. You can pick-up a few days, and if it will make a difference, and I think it can… I would hope we would take those few days and also to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell passed. [...]

The way I think the President needs to fight is to say that he is going to use all of the power he has of a bully pulpit and urge the Senate to stay in, right up to New Years….that’s the problem that I don’t see that kind of a willingness to fight that hard, where he will take that kind of a position and that’s what’s necessary. The Senate and the House, these are tests of wills.

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Democratic Senate aides are telling the Washington Post that a vote on the stand-alone measure could come “late Tuesday or Wednesday, after senators vote to proceed with tax- cut legislation on Monday” but many are also conceding that there may not be enough time for the measure, since “senators also have to vote on a trillion-dollar government spending bill and may also consider the new START Treaty – a bill White House aides privately concede holds more priority.”

The White House expressed support for the stand-alone bill on Friday, but stopped short of calling on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to extend the session. “The president remains committed to seeing this repeal done before Congress leaves town this year,” said Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who also promised Obama would remain engaged on the issue.

This morning, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — the only Democrat to support a Republican filibuster of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — said he supported repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell but voted against it to allow the military to repeal the ban on its own timetable:

MANCHIN: Again, I was only here three weeks…didn’t know much about the issue. It’s something that probably will be, it needs to be repealed and it will be repealed. But I was voting, basically on timeliness. I sat on two meetings of armed services both telling me, ‘it should be on our time table, not legislative time table.’ So I voted to let the military have it on their timetable….I made a decision based on that. [...]

What they were saying was, ‘we got fronts, we got a war in Afghanistan, we got 50 percent of our troops deployed, can you not wait until we get out of this?’

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During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, however, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and the service chiefs all made the opposite argument: congressional repeal would allow the armed forces to implement the change on its own terms. If the Congress fails to act, however, a court ruling could force instantaneous change. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued after the vote, “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 to implement repeal.

Manchin, who prior to the election promised to support the ban if “battlefield commanders can certify it doesn’t hurt unit cohesion,” has had a hard time explaining his position. Following the vote, Manchin issued a statement apologizing for his opposition, “I would like to make clear that my concern is not with the idea of repealing DADT, but rather an issue of timing,” he said. “I truly understand that my position will anger those who believe repeal should happen now and for that I sincerely apologize.”