Senate pulls Gitmo closure funding

[Pragmatic]

Senate pulls Gitmo closure funding
By: David Rogers
May 20, 2009 12:19 PM EST
With Democrats in retreat, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to put the brakes on closing the Guantanamo detention facility and any future plans by President Barack Obama to transfer prisoners to U.S. soil.

The 90-6 roll call follows similar action in the House last week, and Obama is left with no new money to go forward on a signature issue for him — and less flexibility than when he first made his request this spring.

All of $80 million related to the Guantanamo closing has now been stripped from a wartime spending bill moving through Congress, and the Senate amendment indefinitely bars the use of any federal funds to “transfer, release or incarcerate” Guantanamo detainees “to or within the United States.”

In closing remarks, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Obama’s failure to present more of a plan upfront “fell smack dab into the trap” of allowing opponents to define the issue as one where the administration would be releasing detainees into communities around the nation.

“We have maximum security prisons in California eminently capable of holding these people as well and from which people — trust me — do not escape,” Feinstein told her colleagues. “So I believe this has really been an exercise in fear baiting.”

“I believe that American justice is what makes this country strong in the eyes of the world,” Feinstein continued. “And American justice has to be applied to everyone, because if it isn’t, we then become hypocrites in the eyes of the world. We should return to our values and one of the lasting symbols of returning to these values is, in fact, the closure of the facility at Guantanamo.”
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Obama will try to regain the initiative in a speech Thursday when he is expected to address the “grid” of security and values issues raised by Guantanamo. A special executive task force is slated to report in July, shedding more light on how the Defense and Justice departments would carry out the closing by next January. But unless the president is able to convince lawmakers to allow some prisoner transfers into the U.S. the whole timetable is in jeopardy.

At a time when new polls show the president riding high on national security issues, Guantanamo remains especially nettlesome. The president has seemed to hurt his own cause by sending mixed signals as he sorts through the complexity of the larger detainee issue. And he found himself lectured Tuesday by his old rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who also supports the closing of Guantanamo but said Obama botched the effort by taking a “piecemeal” approach without building a plan and consensus upfront.


All this comes against a backdrop in which a new Democracy Corps poll shows Obama enjoying even higher approval ratings for his handling of national security issues than he does on domestic policy. And the president’s performance is credited with erasing in the poll the typical Democratic national security deficit that has shadowed the party since the Vietnam War.

By a 36-point margin, for example, the poll found that voters are more likely now to trust Democrats over Republicans to improve global respect for the United States. Jeremy Rosner, one of the authors, told POLITICO that Obama’s vow to close Guantanamo is an example of how “this president has been able to send a message improving American standing in the world.”

But matched against this success are the more localized, often emotional politics, Republicans have used to spook Democrats, fearing voter backlash over detainees being moved into their home states.

These emotions were well-captured Tuesday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s seemingly contradictory comments after a party muncheon in the Capitol. The Nevada Democrat insisted that closing Guantanamo was still the right decision but said, “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.” Asked next if he could see a day when Guantanamo detainees might be transferred to prisons on American soil, Reid refused to clarify his remarks. “We don’t want them around,” he said.

Reid’s counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was early to see the localized politics of the issue and has beaten the drums steadily on the Guantanamo issue. With his blessing, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) — whose state is home to Fort Sill, a possible detention site — was already poised Tuesday to offer an amendment to bar the transfer of any detainee to American soil, and this helped to force the Democratic retreat.

As reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee last week, the $91.3 billion wartime measure kept the Guantanamo $80 million intact but fenced off the money until a detailed plan was submitted by the president. But with Democrats wavering, Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) agreed to effectively embrace Inhofe’s approach and strip out all of the $80 million.

Inouye held out the option that Obama could still seek funding as part of the regular Defense and Justice department appropriations bills for the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. But at this stage, securing the money now — without an approved plan — was a “nonstarter,” he said.

The White House has sought to downplay the setback, but there was palpable relief among Democrats like Sen. Evan Bayh, up for reelection in Republican-leaning Indiana next year.

Even freshly elected senators with a six-year term in front of them could see the dangers. “I didn’t hear anybody bring it up,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said, recalling town meetings he held during the spring break in April. “But my guess is if you had one headline that we were opening a facility, the first issue would be where. And if it was in Albuquerque, N.M., I’d think we would get many, many calls.”
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