Sometimes the Status Quo Is Good News
Sep 24th, 2009 | 6 responses
Glenn Greenwald has an interesting — and, in my opinion, astute — take on the Obama administration’s announcement that it will not seek new legislation from Congress to place indefinite preventive detention within a Constitutional legal framework, but rather will rely on the Bushian argument that the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) constitutes sufficient authority to continue holding, without trial, about 50 prisoners at Guantanamo who are deemed too dangerous to release.
This is actually good news, says Glenn (emphasis is in original):
Regardless of what motivated this, and no matter how bad the current detention scheme is, this development is very positive, and should be considered a victory for those who spent the last four months loudly protesting Obama’s proposal. Here’s why:
A new preventive detention law would have permanently institutionalized that power, almost certainly applying not only to the “war on Terror” but all future conflicts. It would have endowed preventive detention with the legitimizing force of explicit statutory authority, which it currently lacks. It would have caused preventive detention to ascend to the cherished status of official bipartisan consensus — and thus, for all practical purposes, been placed off limits from meaningful debate — as not only the Bush administration and the GOP Congress, but also Obama and the Democratic Congress, would have formally embraced it. It would have created new and far more permissive standards for when an individual could be detained without charges and without trials. And it would have forced Constitutional challenges to begin from scratch, ensuring that current detainees would suffer years and years more imprisonment with no due process.
Beyond that, as a purely practical matter, nothing good — and plenty of bad — could come from having Congress write a new detention law. As bad as the Obama administration is on detention issues, the Congress is far worse. Any time the words “Terrorism” or “Al Qaeda” are uttered, they leap to the most extreme and authoritarian measures. Congress is intended to be a check on presidential powers, but each time Terrorism is the issue, the ironic opposite occurs: when the Obama administration and Congress are at odds, it is Congress demandinggreater powers of executive detention (as happened when Congress blocked Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.). Any process that lets Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein anywhere near presidential detention powers is one that is to be avoided at all costs. Whatever else is true, anyone who believes in the Far Left doctrines known as the Constitution, due process and what Thomas Jefferson called “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution” (i.e., jury trials) should consider it a very good thing that the Congress is not going to write a new law authorizing presidential preventive detentions. However bad things are now, that would have made everything much worse.
This is not to say that the current scheme is the right one. Obviously, it is not. But Obama’s decision has to be seen in the specific context in which he made it: He has decided not to institutionalize indefinite preventive detention. For those of us who were horrified beyond measure when Obama asserted his intention to do just that, in his National Archives speech, the fact that he has changed his mind is an enormous relief.
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6 Responses to “Sometimes the Status Quo Is Good News”
Agreed 100%
I have always thought very highly of Glenn Greenwald blog. I don't always agree with him, but I have found him to be intellectually consistent and has not let partisanship interfere with his analysis. He goes after democrats and republicans alike on the same issues. That has earned him my respect. His bias is a philosophical one Progressive vs Conservative or sometimes Populist vs Authoritarian, but not (at least for the vast majority of his postings) Democrat vs Republican, unlike a majority of pundits. Additionally he is also very meticulous in his advancing of his position relying largely on facts or evidence and not just opinion and assumptions. Like Kathy I find him astute.
I also agree that it is good news that Obama has decided against going with a policy that he once considered that exceeds anything Bush ever did. I really enjoyed the piece Rachel Maddox did on this:
Rachel Maddow: Indefinite detention? Shame on you… President Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uuWVHT1WUY
And I also enjoyed Greenwald's take on this back in May of this year, as much now as when I first read it back then:
Facts and myths about Obama's preventive detention proposal
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/…
Most of my Conservative friends disagreed with me on this issue, and some of my left-leaning friends who are loathe to criticize anything Obama did disagreed as well, but I have no problem with siding with Greenwald, Maddox, and Kattenburg on this. They are in my opinion absolutely right on this one.
P.S. Mark it on your calendar Kathy =D
P.S. Mark it on your calendar Kathy
Already have.
And I have to say it speaks very well for you that you can make that distinction about Glenn (that he comes from a philosophical rather than a partisan place). He gets a huge amount of grief from the right (not that he can't handle it). It's nice that you have a different take.
You can put polish on a turd, but it's still a turd. Obama isn't creating a new law to hold people indefinitely without trial, he'll just rely on an existing one.
I respect people who are consistent across party lines, even when being so is not in the advantage of their party. Some right wingers on another forum hate it when I do this because they know I'm a republican (although “RINO” is my label there among them or “moderate” in a derrogatory way, I wear it with pride), when I suggest equivalency to a liberal posting however, its more difficult to see of course, since I am right of center, but I do so in an effort to make that side look at its own ideas, just like I do it to the right when I see hypocrisy there. In short, I know where Greenwald is coming from, and while I don't always agree with him, I respect him, for his moral consistency.
It's *not* a law, though, DaGoat. That's the point. It's an interpretation of the AUMF that Bush made, Congress agreed with, and Obama is sticking with, for now. I don't like it, but it's a damn sight better than if it *were* a law, which is what it would have been had Obama gone to Congress as he said he would back in May.
“Congress is intended to be a check on presidential powers”
Don't lose sight of the essentials! The legislative power resides in Congress, not in the executive.