It seems ages ago that President Obama delivered a speech in the early days of his presidency, suffused with self-righteousness and moral demagoguery, announcing he was closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. Unable to resist the temptation to smear his predecessor’s name with distortions and half-truths, the former law professor summoned all his reckless certainty to educate the American people: “Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law.”Obama clearly didn't understand the complexities of foreign relations, war, or anything else, really--and still doesn't.
So Obama, who supported the Supreme Court’s precedent-gutting Boumediene decision, which granted non-citizen enemy combatants habeas corpus rights, ordered the facility closed. Because that was an obviously empty promise, Obama added another executive order two years later establishing periodic review for detainees at the prison. And then the wheels came off the Moral Authority Express. It turned out instead of bringing enemy combatants to Guantanamo, where detainees are well-fed and have access to attorneys, Obama has been sending them to a disease-ridden hell-on-earth in Somalia. And the Obama administration began urging the Supreme Court to ignore the detainees’ appeals. And now it seems those periodic review boards were–what would the president call them? Just words....
He's been nothing but a failure all around.
Ah, but Darren, voting for him enabled people to feel good about themselves. They could finally prove that they weren't like "those other" people. So he was successful at validating some people's world-view.
ReplyDeleteThe, to me, more interesting point is that it appears that government agencies and branches can violate the constitution and the people cannot go to court to stop this.
ReplyDeleteI sorta see why this might make sense from a procedural position (the courts could fill up with spam cases).
But it also suggests that if one party owns the presidency and both houses, then there are next to no checks on their power. Not quite none, but close to none.
Add this together with the power of the commerce clause and I'm pretty sure there are very few limits to presidential power ...
Not good. Unless you want a large, intrusive government. Which I think most Americans do (they just disagree on how it should be used for intrusion).
-Mark Roulo