Barry and the Bill

Section 1021 [ of the defense bill codifying indefinite detention...] contains a disclaimer regarding an intention to expand detention powers for U.S. citizens, but does so only for the powers vested by that specific section. More important, the exclusion appears to extend only to U.S. citizens “captured or arrested in the United States” — meaning that the powers of indefinite detention vested by that section apply to U.S. citizens captured anywhere abroad (there is some grammatical vagueness on this point, but at the very least, there is a viable argument that the detention power in this section applies to U.S. citizens captured abroad).

[...]

[Section 1022 (a)] not only authorizes, but requires (absent a Presidential waiver), that [covered persons] be held “in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.”

[...]

[It] does not contain the broad disclaimer regarding U.S. citizens that 1021 contains. Instead, it simply says that the requirement of military detention does not apply to U.S. citizens, but it does not exclude U.S. citizens from the authority, the option, to hold them in military custody.

It wouldn’t take much for a room full of lawyers (which includes the House on the Hill) to see the vagueness and (intentional) loophole in that.

[The] Obama administration already argues that the original 2001 AUMF authorizes them to act against U.S. citizens (obviously, if they believe they have the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination, then they believe they have the power to detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants).

[...]

The proof that this bill does not expressly exempt U.S. citizens or those captured on U.S. soil is that amendments offered by Sen. Feinstein providing expressly for those exemptions were rejected.

So there will be no veto. Obama needs this bill passed into law so that his lawyers don’t have to waste time defending what he’s already doing; so that it’s no longer something they have to argue – it’s a law in black and white for all to see.

In this fashion, the president can do whatever the hell he wants and get the law to cover it later. Pretty neat trick. He’s not above the law. He is the law.

[F]ormer White House counsel Greg Craig assured The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer back in February, 2009 that it’s “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.”

Apparently it wasn’t hard for Barack Obama to imagine it.

President George W. Bush [claimed] that his office had the inherent power to detain anyone he chose, for as long as he chose, without a trial; to authorize the torture of prisoners; and to spy on Americans without a warrant. President Obama came into office pledging his dedication to the rule of law and to reversing the Bush-era policies.

[...]

This week, he is poised to sign into law terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law.

The measures, contained in the annual military budget bill, will strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military, which has made clear that it doesn’t want the job. The legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial.

  NYT Editorial

Future presidents?

This is a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency.

[...]

Mr. Obama, his spokesman said, is prepared to sign this law because it allows the executive to grant a waiver for a particular prisoner to be brought to trial in a civilian court. But the legislation’s ban on spending any money for civilian trials for any accused terrorist would make that waiver largely meaningless.

It’s Obama telling us once again what a good man he is. See how he demanded a provision that would allow him to commute someone’s military detention into a civil case? I don’t know that this is a cave-in (in fact I’m no longer certain any of Obama’s cave-ins are actually cave-ins), rather than a way to get what he wants while pretending to be “the good guy.” It could be simply a cave-in, but I have more of the sense that President #Compromise has been eager to gain and maintain executive power from day one in the White House. Whether he actually sees himself as the good king who needs that power to do good, I couldn’t say. But I’m not feeling it. To accept that, you’d have to believe that he also thinks Goldman Sachs is a benevolent force for good.

Or maybe Barry is the real life Manchurian Candidate.

Or maybe he’s had a plan all along.

[Chicago, 2006:] On November 3, 2004, the day after he was elected to the U.S. Senate with a record 70 percent of the Illinois vote, Barack Obama declared, "I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office" in 2008. Sitting for an interview late last year in his Senate office on the 39th floor of the Loop's Kluczynski Federal Building, Obama pledges the same thing: his "game plan" on taking office, he says, included "not going national but staying focused on being an Illinois senator."

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Obama has become a more or less conventional blue-state Democrat who often defers to party elders. In this posture, whatever his denials, he looks like a politician with ambitions for higher office.

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Obama's fans are aware that he has what the trade calls a "leadership PAC," a personal political action committee set up to give money to other politicians, thereby earning their loyalty. Obama's PAC, Hopefund, also launched a "Yes We Can" training seminar for young campaign workers in January with another session scheduled for June. Thus, Obama is building up a nationwide network of donors and workers-the kind of thing that people do when they want to lay the groundwork for a presidential campaign.

[...]

In an appearance on Meet the Press in late January, Obama again vigorously denied he had plans to run.

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Obama seems to be seeking a moderate record in the Senate. "He is making alliances with people like Sam Brownback and Tom Coburn," Republican senators from Kansas and Oklahoma, respectively, Ornstein observes.

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"A couple of things help me maintain some perspective," Obama says. "My political success comes relatively late, although I'm young for a senator. . . . Politics is fickle and dependent on a lot of things that have nothing to do with the merits of the candidate."

  Chicago Magazine

Indeed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.