Obama Arrogates Slimy Bush Practices On Gitmo

I can't say that this is a good idea.

President Obama doesn't have enough support in Congress to close the prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo. So what he plans to do is use the wrong-minded policies that his predecessor used — that the Executive Branch can "write its own laws" regarding all things war-related — to bypass Congress.

In other words, President Obama is going to say, "President Bush was right: Guantanamo is solely the Commander In Chief's purview; Congress has no say in what the President does there." Then he is going to say, "By the way, I'm closing it. No vote necessary, thanks."

I have several problems with this:

• First, it affirms the Bush Administration's belief that it can act as the sole arbiter in these matters, and it affirms the Constitutionally-questionable decisions the Bush Administration made in exercising that belief. As far as political trade-offs go, that's pretty poor: Giving credence and legal footing to all of the moral slippage the U.S. made in recent years by using it as a precedent, in exchange for something that could have been achieved with better politicking.
• Second, doing an end-run around Congress does not strengthen the Obama Administration's position in this matter (although the hypocrisy that will evince itself when the Republican members of Congress say, "You can't do that... even though we liked it when Bush did," will be rich). It's not going to improve matters, especially stepping on Democrat congressional toes along with Republican congressional toes. In the long run, stirring things up like this will not pay dividends.
• Third, while America elected Obama, inter alia, to close Guantanamo, they also elected him to be a straight shooter... and instead they get this poor display of if-he-cheated-so-can-I crooked politics. America doesn't want another Clinton, and — for God's sake — it certainly doesn't want another Bush.

I'll give Obama 5 points for the goal, but subtract 10 points for the plan of obtaining it.

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UPDATE:

Anonymous Liberal says that Obama will not be closing Guantanamo, and really is using his Bush-begotten "authority" to imprison terror suspects indefinitely:

I suspect that Obama entered office with the intention of ending the Bush administration's policy of indefinite detention, believing that he could either charge or release everyone currently in custody. And he can. The problem he's discovered is that there are a group of people — certain legacy Bush administration detainees — for whom there is not enough admissible evidence to successfully try but for whom there is enough "evidence" to make a strong public case that the person is dangerous. ...

The result is a difficult political problem. If these people are released or charges are brought against them and then dismissed by a court, Republicans will pounce, accusing Obama of endangering the American people. All of the "evidence" against these people — most of it inadmissible — will quickly find its way into the media through Republican leaks. We've already seen how Republicans reacted to the prospect of moving Guantanamo detainees to domestic prisons. Their reaction to this would be ten times as aggressive. And if, God forbid, any of these released detainees was ever involved in a future terrorist attack, the political consequences for Obama would be disastrous.

I guess this is a long way of saying that I think the best explanation for what's going on here is simple political cowardice. I suspect that Obama, if not subject to political pressure, would not be in favor of indefinite detention. But I think he's unwilling (or at least very wary) of giving the Republicans this kind of political fodder to attack him with. That's not a defensible reason for doing the wrong thing, of course, but I suspect that it is the explanation. Doing the right thing in this case would carry significant political risk.

Of course, as always, Glenn Greenwald writes stuff that everybody should read.

And Rachel Maddow (from Glenn's post) really nails it: