Anyone who thought Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) would just throw up his hands and yell – yes, I support START! – was always living in dream land. Yet, upon Kyl’s release of a timid statement that says he doesn’t think a vote can get done in the lame duck session, reporters have scrambled to pen stories claiming that START is now unlikely to happen. But Kyl’s statement — which still refuses to take a position on the treaty, but typically calls for more delays — actually makes Kyl less relevant. It’s not about deal making with Kyl anymore, it is about the willingness of the White House and Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) to force a vote on START. Reid, not Kyl, controls the Senate calendar, after all.

Throughout the START process, Kyl has been a force for delay and obstruction. Last summer, Kyl was whining immensely that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) was rushing the process and that a committee vote should not happen until after the August recess. After the SFRC delayed, Kyl spoke to Reuters who paraphrased Kyl:

It could be difficult to satisfy his [Kyl's] demands before November and thus the vote on New START might need to take place during the lame duck session if the Senate wants to vote on the treaty this year.

After Sen. Kerry (D-MA) delayed the SFRC vote, I wrote at the time disapprovingly:

Delaying the vote, may have made sure that Senator Kerry and the Administration couldn’t be accused of “rushing” the process, but in the end it probably only strengthened Kyl’s hand and got him closer to his goal of blocking the treaty this year. In the end, the only way the treaty probably gets passed this year is if the Obama administration and the Senate leadership call Kyl out and force a vote.

But Kyl kept moving the goal posts. In September, after the SFRC did hold its vote, Kyl and Senate Republicans argued that having a vote before the election was impossible because it would politicize the process and that a vote should happen after the election. Time Magazine quoted an anonymous Senate Republican Aide who said:

This notion that [ratification] is going to happen before November is completely absurd… It reeks of politics.

Predictably, now that the election has passed, Kyl and Republicans say there isn’t enough time in the Senate calendar. Well, there would be plenty of time in the Senate calendar if Senate Republicans agreed to not needlessly stall the process. But Kyl’s statement essentially threatens to do exactly that –- to attempt to run out the clock on the Senate session and force Reid to forgo bringing up the treaty. He threatened the same thing last summer.

But the ball is no longer in Kyl’s court. The question is now will Reid and the White House give up and say there isn’t enough time for START or will they make the time and force a vote.

Perhaps, if a vote is forced, Kyl will lead a mass Republican boycott, in which pro-START Senators vote no out of party loyalty. That is a risk. But if Kyl is actually willing to vote no on the treaty in the lame duck, than he is in all likelihood not going to push for ratification in the new Senate, making the treaty all but dead anyway. Forcing a vote is also less risky than starting the ratification process from scratch and leaving the treaty in the hands of the next Senate. So essentially, what Kyl says or doesn’t say in the next few weeks shouldn’t change the calculus on whether or not to hold a vote.

As ThinkProgress and The Progress Report have documented, there is a growing coalition of both Tea Party-backed conservatives and stalwart progressives who are coming together to demand cuts to the bloated defense budget. This coalition was given further momentum last week, when the co-chairs of President Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission released a report that calls for $100 billion in defense cuts.

This morning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed back against this movement for defense cuts. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, Gates revealed that he had told the co-chairs of the deficit commission that it would be “catastrophic” to cut defense spending by 10 percent. He told attendees today that cutting defense spending requires a “scalpel, not a meat axe,” and concluded, “When it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem“:

President Barack Obama’s deficit commission last week recommended significant cuts in military spending as part of its formula for drying up red ink in the federal budget. Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates punched back. “When it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem,” Mr. Gates told attendees at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council here.

Mr. Gates says he met with deficit panel chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson and delivered the message that a proposal to cut military spending by 10% “would be catastrophic,” given security threats the U.S. faces and save only $55 billion. That would make only a minor dent in a deficit that’s over $1 trillion a year, he suggested. Defense savings, he said, require “a scalpel, not a meat axe.”

Mr. Gates says he’s getting good cooperation from military leaders in an effort to cut $100 billion from military overhead, but he said he wants to reinvest that money in increasing the military’s fighting capability — what Mr. Gates called the “tooth side.”

U.S. defense spending dwarfs over one hundred countries’ GDPs, and 2009 spending is over $500 billion more than what China reportedly budgets, the world’s next highest military spender. And it is simply untrue that the Department of Defense is not a major factor in the budget deficit. Defense spending has accounted 65 percent of the discretionary spending increase since 2001, making it a key factor in the growth of the U.S. budget deficit since then.

To really understand exactly how much spending the Department of Defense consumes, all one has to do is look at the amount of discretionary spending that goes to the military compared to other sectors. The non-partisan National Priorities Project put together the following graph, showing how discretionary spending for FY2010 is doled out. The Pentagon’s budget consumes 58 percent of this spending, dwarfing all other sectors:

Last spring, Gates gave a speech at the Eisenhower Library about the need for a more efficient and streamlined Pentagon budget. He warned that creating such a budget would take “political will and willingness…to make hard choices — choices that will displease powerful people both inside the Pentagon and out.” It is up to Gates to admit that reining in the Pentagon budget must be part of any serious effort to reduce the deficit, and to stand up to those “powerful people.”

Today, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Rep. Nydia Velasquez (D-NY) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) will meet with President Obama to talk about a way to pass immigration reform or the DREAM Act during Congress’s lame-duck session. If the Democrats decide to move forward on immigration, it will be the first time Congress seriously undertakes immigration since the failed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 and the DREAM Act debate which took place a few months later.

The first bill was strongly backed by the White House, which was then occupied by the second Bush administration. Former President George W. Bush reflected on the failure of immigration reform at a book fair this past weekend:

BUSH: The issue got away. The rhetoric on the issue was very difficult. And somebody was nervous about the border — and I can understand why people are, we ought to enforce our borders — but automatically labeling any comprehensive plan as pure amnesty made it very difficult to get people to pay attention.

Meanwhile, last night, former Secretary of State from the first Bush administration, Colin Powell, explained what moderate Republicans should stand for:

POWELL: A moderate Republican in my judgement is someone who is quite sympathetic to the social needs of our citizens, who is open towards immigration. Immigration is keeping our country thriving. And the issue of civil rights and the issue of taking care of those in our society who are not doing as well as the rest of us — I think that should be part of the Republican mantra too.

Watch it:

Over the past couple of weeks, Bush has repeatedly alluded to the heated rhetoric around the immigration issue that killed comprehensive reform. Yet, he has stopped short of naming names. As Congress considers taking up the issue again, it’s worth noting that it was members of Bush’s own party that engaged in anti-immigrant fear mongering and that they paid for it dearly in the 2008 elections.

Back when Bush was president, Congress still had plenty of Republicans who were moderate on immigration. In fact, several of them — including Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — were looked upon as champions of immigration reform. Now, those three Senators, along with the rest of their party, are the biggest thing standing in its way. Most of them have resorted to the polarizing rhetoric cited by Bush whenever any plan to regularize the status of undocumented immigrants is brought up. No matter how stringent the penalties and requirements are, they cry “amnesty.”

I’ve written before about the serious defects of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, but, regardless of its flaws, it represents an era of bipartisanship and compromise on immigration that Republicans seem incapable of today. I’d love for Republicans to prove me wrong by embracing immigration legislation in the next few weeks. I’m not holding my breath on that, but I am willing to place money on the fact that if they don’t, the Latino vote will come back to bite them again in 2012.

Over the past several months, neoconservatives have been ramping up efforts to pressure the Obama administration into threatening a “military option” against Iran.

In September, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) declared, “It is time to retire our ambiguous mantra about all options remaining on the table,” and tell the Iranians that we will prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability “with military force if we absolutely must.” Lieberman restated this view in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning.

Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to make U.S.-Iran policy, insisting that “containment is off the table,” and saying that the U.S. should go to war with Iran “not to just neutralize their nuclear program,” but to “neuter that regime.”

Speaking in New Orleans last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added his voice to the pressure effort, saying, “If the international community, led by the U.S., wants to stop Iran without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.”

Speaking today, however, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates knocked back such calls for more aggressive rhetoric, saying that military action is not a long-term answer:

“A military solution, as far as I’m concerned … it will bring together a divided nation. It will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. And they will just go deeper and more covert,” Gates said.

“The only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest. Everything else is a short-term solution.”

In a recent article, the Brookings Institution’s Ken Pollack concluded that, in addition to generating a number of other highly negative consequences, “attacking Iran is more likely to guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal than to preclude it.” Numerous other defense analysts and officials have reached similar conclusions.

In addition to representing the strong consensus of the national security community, Gates’ aversion to hawkish rhetoric also reflects the view of Iranian human rights activists like Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji, who have said that military threats from the U.S. are harmful to their efforts to challenge the regime internally.

Over the past several months, neoconservatives have been ramping up efforts to pressure the Obama administration into threatening a “military option” against Iran.

In September, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) declared, “It is time to retire our ambiguous mantra about all options remaining on the table,” and tell the Iranians that we will prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability “with military force if we absolutely must.” Lieberman restated this view in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning.

Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to make U.S.-Iran policy, insisting that “containment is off the table,” and saying that the U.S. should go to war with Iran “not to just neutralize their nuclear program,” but to “neuter that regime.”

Speaking in New Orleans last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added his voice to the pressure effort, saying, “If the international community, led by the U.S., wants to stop Iran without resorting to military action, it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.”

Speaking today, however, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates knocked back such calls for more aggressive rhetoric, saying that military action is not a long-term answer:

“A military solution, as far as I’m concerned … it will bring together a divided nation. It will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. And they will just go deeper and more covert,” Gates said.

“The only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest. Everything else is a short-term solution.”

In a recent article, the Brookings Institution’s Ken Pollack concluded that, in addition to generating a number of other highly negative consequences, “attacking Iran is more likely to guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal than to preclude it.” Numerous other defense analysts and officials have reached similar conclusions.

In addition to representing the strong consensus of the national security community, Gates’ aversion to hawkish rhetoric also reflects the view of Iranian human rights activists like Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji, who have said that military threats from the U.S. are harmful to their efforts to challenge the regime internally.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.