The Washington Post today dives in to a question that I’ve wondered about almost since President Obama took office — what happened to the effort to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay? The reasons are as boring as you’d expect. Republicans thought they could gain a political advantage by fear-mongering about it. Congressional Democrats weren’t willing to stick their necks out to defend the President’s plan. The Obama administration started backing away from the issue as soon as it became a political risk. Now we’re at a point where both parties have essentially accepted that adhering to the Constitution is optional when it comes to terrorism, however politicians choose to define it.
April 24, 2011 at 11:34 pm
for what it’s worth, there was a real, if brief, effort made to find a state willing to take one subset of the prisoners and a country willing to take some others, and both fell through for petty local reasons.
April 25, 2011 at 10:23 am
I’m glad you used the word boring, because I think that speaks volumes. It is boring, precisely because the same sort of situation seems to have happened very often since Obama came into office. The Senate isn’t really behind him, republicans loathe him, things really seem bogged down. The real question is, what is he going to do to get re-elected? His entire campaign rested on not being the same old boring politician we’d always elected before. How is he going to escape being boring before the next election cycle?
April 25, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Hmmm. Ft. Leavenworth is a federal penitentiary. Why not stick ’em there?
Kansas doesn’t like it? Time to start reducing block grants.