Thanks to Lynn Sweet, we now know who was responsible for placing the ban on federal funds for federal criminal trials of Guantanamo detainees in the National Defense Authorization Act. It was the Illinois Republican delegation, concerned about the rather remote possibility that the Obama administration would ultimately be moving detainees to the designated “Gitmo North” Thompson former correctional facility. In fact, the ban is almost a non-sequitur in this regard, except in the sense that it makes it more difficult to close Gitmo, both by banning trials and making voluntary transfers to countries with “known recidivists” conditional on the approval of the Secretary of Defense.
That’s not the whole story though. Jen DiMascio reports that the Democrats acquiesced to the ban as part of a deal to go forward with repealing DADT
The merits of the deal are worth talking about, but I think the revelation of a deal is also important, for two reasons.
First, I tend to look at legislation in isolation. I follow what I’m interested in, but on some practical, intuitive level that approach does not make sense, and I know it. I can and should assume there is Congressional and White House horsetrading on several pieces or projects at the same time, and that’s worth remembering.
Further, I think members of Congress (and to some extent, the political media) want us to look at each piece of legislation in isolation. That way, we can listen to the lofty statements of members as they list objections on each item, ostensibly looking at the bill in isolation and on the (individual) merits, with the deal-making process going on behind the scenes.
These debates would sound a lot different if Senators or House members were appearing on cable and stating, simply “I traded X for Y, so there ya go”. That would remove a lot of the mystery, certainly. Maybe this agonizing deal-making is so obvious it doesn’t need to be stated, but I don’t think it is. I suspect it’s valuable for all of us “out here” to see the bargaining behind the scenes more often because, well, that’s what really happened.
Second, I think Guantanamo closure is an example of how an executive order is really a limited and narrow tool. It’s quick, it’s (relatively) painless, but if there’s no majority Congressional or public support, an executive order can easily be rendered meaningless by Congress, or even backfire, as it seems to have here.
General Stuck
Republicans want to keep the terrorist boogyman offshore. It is easier to demonize them and inflate their omnipotent like powers to destroy. Having KSM shuffle into an American courtroom in shackles with a sad on his face, creates the counterimage, which is reality, that these fuckers are nothing more than flesh and blood mortal humans having committed crimes, like any other mortal human that when caught faces justice.
cleek
i blame Obama
Comrade Jake
I wonder what Greenwald will think about all of this.
MAJeff
So that’s why closet-case Kirk voted “aye.” And yet, prettyboy Schock still voted “no.”
General Stuck
@Comrade Jake:
see comment #2
Kay
@General Stuck:
I blame Republicans, Stuck, but honestly, I don’t think there’s public support for this. I don’t know how to remedy that, in terms of changing minds. I vehemently disagree, I think the opposition is nonsense, but that’s what is, I think.
If they wouldn’t bite in Illinois with a big, job-creating investment in the prison industry, in this economy, well…
Michael D.
I’m about three-quarters of the way through Matt Taibbi’s book, Griftopia, and I have to say I disagree with this.
Politicians don’t want you to look at all. It would prove that they have no idea what they’re passing though Congress and who it’s benefiting. Not even a little bit.
Wag
Sausage making is an ugly but necessary business.
General Stuck
@Kay:
Americans have enjoyed our time as a country largely geographically protected from the evils of the world, while too often inflicting some of those evils. Out of sight, out of mind. And the wingnuts simply give them excuses to keep it that way. Terrorists in American court rooms, violates the rarified airs of such a mindset from our other worldly-like perch.
liberal
OT: Excellent article on the US, Afghanistan, and Pakistan by Anatol Lieven.
liberal
@Michael D.:
Huh? I would assume they know exactly who it’s benefiting: their paymasters.
Chris- The Fold
And don’t forget that Mark Kirk who struck the deal to keep detainees from coming to Illinois is gay. Why in the world Kirk would have to strike such a deal to vote in favor of legislation that would make his lifestyle freer is troubling.
Sly
It would be honest in the respect that it would show the agenda of legislators, i.e. their desire to keep being legislators. Deal-making is essential to the job security of any elected official. “I got you X, Y, and Z in exchange for my vote on something you likely don’t care very much about.”
The reason why this isn’t out in public is because the public, like most employers, cares very little for the job security of the people who ostensibly work for them.
Mr. Prosser
We will never know all the horse trading, deal making and general crappery that goes on, if we did we’d constantly be throwing the the weasels out. We’re all a bit like Sergeant Schultz and more than happy to be so. If Assange were leaking the secrets of Congress he would already be at Supermax in Colorado.
burnspbesq
Along similar lines, in his “Wonkbook” email today Ezra posits a very plausible theory of why the Republicans pulled the rug out from under the omnibus spending bill: using continuing resolutions to continue to fund the government at FY10 levels means that there are zero dollars to fund implementation of health care reform or FinReg.
General Stuck
@burnspbesq:
This is profound a truth as can be written. And Mcconnell even wants a CR back to 2008 levels, or a twenty percent cut from current non military spending. It is the singular focus right now of the wingnuts, to do whatever it takes to halt implementation of HCR, and also the hated Consumer Protection agency from finreg. The only question is what level of economic nihilism they are willing to adopt for these goals.
burnspbesq
One nice thing about political deals is that they aren’t legally enforceable. If there was in fact a gitmo-for-DADT deal made in this Congress, nothing (other than a lack of cojones or respect for tradition) prevents the Democrats from reneging as soon as Obama signs the DADT repeal bill, and revisiting the Gitmo issue next year.
Do I believe that the Democrats have the cojones to pull such a stunt? No, I don’t. Alas.
The Real American Democrat
Obama scored big time all winter long. His master plan, I assure you, is that continued horse trading with republican nitwits will allow him to continue schooling them like man amongst boys. When Obama is winning, why run out the clock? He’s going to get everything that he wants to make America a great country once again.
daveNYC
Revist Gitmo and do what exactly? Republicans have the House, and the Senate is its normal kludged up mess.
It’s pathetic that in order to advance human rights for Americans we had to continue to curb stomp human rights for non-Americans.
cleek
@The Real American Democrat:
cue inspirational music set to slo-mo film of US flag waving proudly in a stiff breeze
cleek
@daveNYC:
umm… wha?
Linda Featheringill
Yeah, making sausage is a dirty business.
LBJ, who got a lot done, seemed to enjoy wheeling and dealing. I think that he went into politics because it’s often dirty. Nothing like rasslin in the mud.
[“. . . I need a dirty woman, I need a dirty gell . . .”]
brent
@burnspbesq:
If there was in fact a gitmo-for-DADT deal made in this Congress, nothing (other than a lack of cojones or respect for tradition) prevents the Democrats from reneging as soon as Obama signs the DADT repeal bill, and revisiting the Gitmo issue next year.
Well not “nothing” at all. In fact, the reason that they won’t do so is the whole nature of any deal. Reneging on a deal severely compromises your ability to do other deals in the future and Gitmo is not nearly important enough to do so. Indeed, if anything were important enough for them to renege on, then they probably wouldn’t trade it in a deal in the first place.
Aside from that, they obviously don’t have the votes now to get what the president wants and they will have even fewer votes after New Years so really neither the “cojones” nor “respect for tradition” really have much to do with it.
Resident Firebagger
Did any of Bush’s EOs “backfire” in this manner? I can’t recall…
Omnes Omnibus
@Resident Firebagger: For fuck’s sake… What is your point here?
Villago Delenda Est
@General Stuck:
If only these guys had committed less serious crimes, like, oh, I don’t know, launching wars of aggression and committing a plethora of war crimes, Obama would just insist that we “move forward” and not worry about it too much.
kay
@Resident Firebagger:
I don’t know. They issue a lot of executive orders.
Here’s the Bush List.
I think there’s probably a difference between an EO that can be entirely put into effect at the executive level (Bush established a new Faith Based Initiative office, for example) and one that cannot.
The Gitmo closure EO was vulnerable. As a practical matter, Obama needed congressional sign-on, or at the very least he needed congressional inaction.
Svensker
@Resident Firebagger:
Oh, geez, give it a break already. Obama got not one Democrat backing him on Gitmo. Everybody, including Feingold whom I usually admire, backed up like O was holding radioactive toxins. Obama has disappointed on lots of things, but trying to hang Gitmo around his neck is really unfair. The Dems totally weaseled out on him.
lllphd
wrt executive orders being over-ridden by congress…
that’s as it should be. executive orders, as we discovered in the bush years, are far too close to dictatorial powers, and should be subject to congressional over-ride.
but yeah, the whole bargaining feature of the legislation process is beyond irksome for the very reasons stated here. we’ve clearly devolved to the level of hostage trading with the american people’s government.
General Stuck
@Villago Delenda Est:
Lame
kay
@Resident Firebagger:
Here’s Obama’s EO record, so far.
Omnes Omnibus
@lllphd: Horse trading can be an effective way of cobbling together a majority on beneficial legislation that affect only a small number of people. On the other hand, for it to work properly, the traders all need to be working in good faith and all needed to be interested in moving some kind of legislation forward. What we have now is a legislature with a plurality, at least, that doesn’t care if anything gets done. It makes it hard to make decent deals. Plus, i think the GOP has decided that, even where they cannot prevent legislation from going forward, they will extract a price, they will work to ensure that some aspect of the new law will piss off or disappoint some element of the Dem coalition. It is nihilistic and cynical, but effective.
Villago Delenda Est
@General Stuck:
Perhaps they should have committed other lesser crimes, like stealing homes out from underneath people with paid up mortgages?
Or plundering pension funds for shits and grins and then running to the feds to cover their bad bets?
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@lllphd:
Indeed. I love how some folks act as if the only reason to vote for Obama was to put a Liberal Bush in the White House.
Observer
Don’t know about that.
Bush the Younger would have just ignored Congress on this one, claiming national security powers under either the Patriot Act or in the general terms of the authorization for force. Then Congress would have been forced to choose to go to court or to back down.
Either way, the deed would have been done.
I’m not picking on Obama here, but you really can’t tell me that his hands are tied after 8 years of watching Bush ignore and mislead congress via executive orders and other shenanigans.
lllphd
@Omnes Omnibus:
god, could not agree more. hence the hostage level of bargaining, as opposed to simple – and good faith – horse trading.
utterly despicable what the republicans have been doing. or not doing, as the case may be. but just as despicable that the media do not call them on it.
i do believe we’re screwed.
Martin
@Resident Firebagger:
Backfire? What here has backfired? Ineffective, sure, but backfire?
Omnes Omnibus
@Observer: Are you advocating that Obama simply do what Bush was doing? I don’t believe that going that route ends up where we would like to be. Presidents have limits on their authority; Bush chose to act as though that was not the case and Obama does not.
kay
@Martin:
That’s my opinion, Martin, just because the issue was “officially” unsettled prior to Obama’s issuing the executive order and then Congress acted in response (opposition) to the EO.
In that sense, it took us backward. Now the opposition is tangible and real. Its written.
If the idea was to move the ball forward, the EO backfired.
That’s all hindsight and issuing an EO was a perfectly defensible mechanism or tactic at the time, but this shows me, anyway, that that mechanism may be of very narrow use.
Maude
@Martin:
Speaking of backfire, thanks for your wonderful car comment. Nice cheer up.
It’s all How Obama Has Failed Us Today.
The violins are tuning up for the new year.
Don’t you know that it’s all so simple and easy? Why, all Obama has to do is snap his fingers and voila, it’s done.
PS
@Omnes Omnibus: Exactly. There is a continual refrain here: Obama’s “long game” is to change the nature of our political discourse, and he clearly believes that this cannot be done by fiat. He may fail, but two years is much to short a time to judge his strategy.
kay
@Observer:
I don’t really think in those terms.
“Hands are tied”, like that. I was just talking about a certain mechanism or tool, and conclusions I can draw about its use, or effectiveness.
Legislation isn’t bullet-proof either.
I’m just talking about picking the right tool for the specific job. In hindsight, of course, when it’s easy to second-guess.
MJ
This kind of punches a hole into that “Obama wasn’t willing to give up anything to push through DADT repeal” argument. No?
Davis X. Machina
@PS.
Well, when Ileft that voting booth in ’08, and later that night, when I watched the results, I said to myself “Damn, that’s done! Now we finally have our Bush. Son-of-a-bitch better start breaking shit.”
Because that’s the way Obama came off throughout the campaign.
Isn’t it?
TooManyJens
@Observer:
I don’t know about you, but that’s one of the many reasons most liberals opposed him.
PS
@Davis X. Machina: No.
To elaborate on a SASQ: Lots of people — and I guess you are one — projected onto Obama something very different than he was saying. Remember all that “not a red America, not a blue America” stuff?
Mnemosyne
@Woodrow “asim” Jarvis Hill
I especially love how Observer came along to make exactly that complaint right under your comment.
“Why won’t our current dictator do what I want him to do?” wasn’t really the question I was asking myself in 2008.
TooManyJens
@PS: Pretty sure you missed the sarcasm there.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Omnes Omnibus: Further, I thought that was one of the primary reasons to vote for Obama.
As Democrats, we should do what we can to preserve the rule of law. Yes, the GOP breaks the rules. But we’re no better if we help them destroy the concept of rule of law. Anyone think that once there are no rules the conservatives will suddenly start playing nice? We need the rules.
PS
@TooManyJens: Could be … trouble is, I have heard that said without sarcasm.
Mnemosyne
@MJ:
That’s why this story will die a quick death in the lefty blogosphere. It doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve built about Obama.
Maude
@Mnemosyne:
Also because the whinge of Obama didn’t close Gitmo gets altered. They’d have to come up with something else and from what I’ve read, they aren’t too inventive.
They’ll have to stick with Obama didn’t prosecute Bush/Cheney.
Never mind that he doesn’t prosecute anyone. As the late great Ronald W. Reagan said: facts are stupid things.
Mnemosyne
@Maude:
I’m also expecting some blathering about how you can’t trust anonymous sources from the same people who screech like a cat with its tail caught in a door every time an anonymous source says Obama is going to kill Social Security.
bobbo
Kinda bums me out that my right to kill brown people was gained in exchange for other people’s right to put brown people in prison forever based on fake evidence obtained through torture. But really I’m a glass half-full kind of person.
Joey Maloney
@Kay:
I admit the following is unlikely because it posits an electorate with a memory that reaches back further than yesterday morning’s Fox and Friends, but…
Illinois tried that in the 1980s, and they found out it sucked. Big Jim Thompson embarked on a prison-building spree, dotting podunk towns all over Downstate with low- and medium-security lockups. That got lots of good construction jobs that lasted for a year or 18 months; after that the towns were left with a few hundred low-paid nonunion guard jobs that were just about the most awful, soul-killing work imaginable.
And as the prisons filled up with mostly minority, mostly gang-affiliated mostly Chicagoans, some of their families and business associates moved south to be near them. And all of a sudden these small towns were confronted with all kinds of big-city problems that their small-town cops had neither the skills nor the body count to deal with. Surprise, surprise, surprise. What Springfield sold as an economic-development bonanza turned out to be a bad deal all around.
Southern Beale
Serwer’s take on it, from the link:
Meh. I guess I don’t know what else could be done? Maybe I just don’t like knowing how the sausage is made.
Southern Beale
@Mnemosyne:
Wow and here I thought Balloon Juice was a lefty blog. My mistake.
Kay
@Joey Maloney:
Oh, I’m not in favor of prisons as economic development. I just thought that was how it was sold.
I live near a county jail. I don’t think it’s been any boon to the local economy, which is how it was sold.
Bill Murray
So what’s the timeline on this horse trading? The EO was back in early 2009 and the congressional opposition shortly thereafter, while DADT happened very recently. So somehow there was a deal kept secret for nearly two years? I probably am missing something here, but that seems pretty implausible
Snarki, child of Loki
The solution is simple, if one can think outside the box:
Congress withholds funds for US civilian trials or repatriation of detainees. Fine. See what can be done without funds.
Cut a deal with Cuba: they get taken off the state-sponsored terror list (which is BS anyway), open up diplomatic relations.
In return, open the Gitmo gates so the detainees can walk into Cuba, which will then repatriate them. Cost? Zero.
“Oh, what if they return to being terrorists?” That’s what Hellfire missiles are for. You can also tell them, prior to release, that they’ve been “chipped” and that they will be tracked by satellite.
Catsy
@burnspbesq:
I had this exact same thought when I first read the story. The Democrats need to do this.
Republicans have been acting in transparently, insultingly bad faith for years now. They’ve demonstrated a repeated willingness to lie and renege on any deal they make. Give the motherfuckers a taste of their own medicine.
I just don’t see a downside, other than Republicans whining. What are they going to do, act even more in bad faith?
kay
@Bill Murray:
The timeline works:
Someone inserted the ban on federal funds for the use of federal trials for Gitmo detainees, this time into the National Defense Authorization Act which the House is meant to vote on soon. The Senate was apparently going to pass the DADT-repeal free NDAA by unanimous consent, but Republicans might try to force a debate as part of their strategy to “run out the clock.”
It was all part of that wrangling.
Barney Frank is the source.
cmorenc
Obama should have simply moved the Gitmo Detainees to a high-security military brig in the continental US, all at once, and closed Gitmo, pulling off a fait accompli *before* Congress would have had time to do anything about it in reaction. It would have forced both the “how do we legitimately give these detainees a proper hearing” issue and “how do we securely detain the ones we need to within US territory” issue.
By trying first to negotiate (and leave room to demagogue) what should have been a non-negotiable issue to begin with, is what’s left the administration and the detainees in such a nebulous, intractable state.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Yup, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. The template for this in LBJ’s wheeling and dealing during 1964-1965.
I think because Lyndon’s personal was so earthy, and because of the famed “johnson treatment” people tend to think he arm twisted his way to every victory, when in fact when you read the transcripts of his oval office phone calls, he was a horse trader.
When people mention this in the context of Obama, they get mocked by the haters (ie “11th dimension chess”), but that’s what it is.