Indeed, Democrats face a tough choice. The lame-duck congressional to-do list is already impressively long - including consideration of the President George W. Bush-era tax cuts and government spending bills - but waiting until next year reduces the chances that anything will be done on the issue, given that Republicans are widely expected to gain seats, and possibly the majority of one or both chambers.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, which is fighting to uphold the ban on gay service members, said she expects gay rights supporters to try again, but said, "it will not succeed."
She said the Defense Department's review has been designed to try to push a transition to allowing gay troops, but she said lawmakers will reject that.
"Members of the Senate will see through that, since military personnel were limited to discussions of how to implement repeal, not whether the law should be retained," she said.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a think tank at the University of California at Santa Barbara, dedicated to studying sexuality and the military, said it's possible that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid overreached by trying to attach immigration legislation to the defense policy bill, giving Republicans another reason to filibuster it.
But he said Democratic leaders aren't to blame for the legislative stalemate - rather, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did a masterful job of marshaling his own party.
"The reason that the defense authorization did not go through - it was not Harry Reid and it was not Barack Obama, it was the Republicans, not being bad people, but just doing their job in an election year," he said.
The question for November is whether gay rights supporters - usually a strong voting bloc for Democrats - feel their expectations have been met.
Mr. Belkin said he thinks those voters will credit Democrats for adding sexual orientation to hate-crimes laws last year, rather than protest the shortcomings this year, and he said gay voters will turn out.
"I think that the percentages will be roughly the same as they've been in the past in terms of three-fourths voting for Democrats and a fourth voting for Republicans. You certainly don't see the fire in the belly you saw two years ago and four years ago for Democrats, but I don't anticipate the gay community will stay home," he said.
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