Good on most of the Dems for voting against this (9 voted for) and good on a few Republicans (Rand Paul, anyone?) for voting against, too. I can’t see that this is constitutional (the part about indefinite detention of citizens), in light of Hamdi. The vote was 55-45, and I suspect it will pass easily in the (Republican controlled) House.
And I don’t like Congress telling the executive branch that the military must be used to detain alleged terrorists, even if this bill does allow the president to waive the requirement on a case-by-case basis. I would be interested in what our resident legal minds have to say about the constitutionality of that part of the proposed bill.
I don’t see why the president should veto-proof Congress just because the Senate is controlled by his party. And this bill was mostly a Republican bill anyway, if that really matters to you.
Even though he’s threatening to veto it, he apparently refuses to actually make a positive moral stand against it.
They say he’s refusing to support an attempt to legitimise his government’s authoritarian douchebaggery because it doesn’t give him enough power. Even if that’s just a front, I can’t say I respect the White House if they’re too much of a bunch of cowards to even say they can’t accept any legislation that allows for the indefinite incarceration of innocent US citizens without trial. As much as we may mock people for making a stand against neo-Nazis or beating baby seals with clubs, what does it say about someone who refuses to do even that without obfuscating?
And I don’t give the Democrats credit for voting against it without knowing whether any of them were voting as a bloc or not. If they can rely on the Republicans to do all the heavy lifting, having half a dozen senators agree to vote for it so that others could maintain the fiction that they oppose it is not beyond the realm of possibility.
As it turns out, according to Democratic senator Carl Levin, not only is the Obama administration not opposed to the indefinite incarceration of US citizens without trial, they’re the ones who asked that that be part of the bill!
Unfortunately this isn’t really surprising. A lot of us worried that once the precedents had been set, it would really difficult to convince any future administration to voluntarily refuse power.
We’re never going to get rid of the scumbags in the Republican and Democratic parties if people like you continue to refuse to vote for anyone else.
Don’t abstain and act like that makes you morally superior. Find a third party candidate who isn’t in favour of this sort of behaviour, and vote for them instead.
Why would Obama or anyone else care about holding U.S. citizens indefinitely? They assassinate suspect citizens without providing proof. This includes 16 year old children.
I’ve been told before that no President would attempt to indefinitely detain or attempt to assassinate a US citizen on US soil, so I’m not going to worry too much about this legislation.
I can’t find the text with a superficial Google - did Obama say what it was that he thought constrained his authority? Is it the waiver?
I can’t shake the feeling that there is either more, or less, to it than the article says.
Obama is supposed to be a Constitutional scholar - does he think this is going to pass Constitutional muster? Why does he think that?
There has to be something I am not getting, or is not being discussed. Is this just the creeping tendency of a President to grab for more and more authority? Or what?
I really tried to avoid pointing the finger here. But c’mon let’s face the facts, we all know which presidential administration we have to thank for this.