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Obama and Holder reversal: will it be a military trial for KSM after all? — 35 Comments

1. Great point about the flip-flop offending everyone. And I wonder if the Left would really rather have Guantanomo in existence than the military tribunal process; Gitmo was always merely symbolic, while the Left might have substantive problems with the tribunals.

2. Neo: Hope you don’t mind this totally off-topic comment on the HCR machinations:

   A couple days ago, I commented here to point out something that seemed to have been overlooked by the conservative blogosphere: the fact that, because the House will have already passed the Senate bill as the first step in the reconciliation, defeating reconciliation will only mean we get stuck with the Senate’s version of Obamacare rather than the House-“fixed” version.

   Fortunately, this exact point has now being widely discussed thanks to several recent in blogs like Legal Insurrection and NRO’s The Corner.

   I’m hoping the same thing might happen if I point out another troubling aspect of the Dems’ proposed cramdown scheme: it would seem to promise a bill that is patently unconstitutional.

   Article 1, Sec. 7 of the Constitution requires all revenue bills to originate in the House.

   A “revenue bill,” as the name suggests, is a bill that levies taxes:

   http://www.answers.com/topic/revenue-bills

   The Senate bill raises taxes in 17 different ways:

   http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/11/17-tax-increases.html

   Therefore, it would seem the plan to have the House pass the Senate bill, and for that bill to then serve as the vehicle for HCR, simply won’t comply with the plain terms of the Constitution.

   I’m not sure how the Dems get around this. If they say the Senate bill is not really a revenue bill, but rather covers a lot of stuff having no fiscal impact, doesn’t that make it hard for them to then get around the Byrd Rule when attempting reconciliation?

   Hopefully, we have some smart Constitutional lawyers on our side who are working on this angle.

   Again, my apologies. Now back to your regular programming.

3. I was listening to Mark Levin’s show in the car a few nights ago and he had John Lott on as a guest (John lott of the Gun Rights research area).

   He was at the University of Chicago’s law school when Barack Obama arrived as a Lecturer (not professor). He described how he went up to Obama at a faculty meeting and introduced himself to welcome obama to the school. Obama said “oh You’re the gun guy” and “I don’t believe people should be allowed to have guns” and walked away.

   Lott’s take was the Obama was left of a left wing faculty and did not like to be with people that disagreed with him or to argue positions like other academics.

   Clearly this is true with the KSM trial. Obama could not accept differing opinions until the damage was done.

4. Sounds convincing to me. Obama’s caving is unlikely to be part of any real change of mind or policy. It appears prmarily strategic, and moderate Republicans may be playing right into his hands.

   I don’t expect Obama to change his mind either.

   Obama is likely making lemonade from lemons. With or without a deal on Gitmo, the civilian KSM trial is dead. Obama & Co. are not entirely fools that they do not recognize this new fact on the ground.

   So why not try to get a deal on Gitmo? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

   If it fails, they can chalk up another bipartisan demerit against Republicans. That’s about the only leverage Obama has on Republicans these days.

   But having seen how well Republicans handled the healthcare summit, when Obama was attempting to wield the bipartisan threat, I’m optimistic that the Reps can smell the weakness in Obama’s deal.

   Of course, we should still keep our eye on the ball.

5. Robert Kagan has an op/ed in today’s WaPo in which he says Obama and the right are coming together on foreign policy, but I don’t believe it. Obama only moves right (or bettr said, correct) when the other side can’t be out-argued. Obama’s initial pronouncements, be they about Guantanamo, Iraq, Honduras, or health care are what he really believes. He maneuvers when he can’t prevail without losing big. But this is what scares me about him. His gut response to the 3AM call is gonna be wrong. I can’t believe how incompetent he is at seeing the implications of his positions.

6. I say that desperation is the key to understanding Obama’s current moves.

   Thirteen and a half months into Obama’s presidency he still has no accomplishments to claim. This is astounding. A president’s first year is the golden one, the wind-at-your-back year in which low-hanging fruit is plucked and a foundation for the remaining years is laid — to mix several metaphors.

   That’s what Obama and his advisors were trying to do but in their hubris they overestimated their victory and believed that FDR-fashion they could wrench the country hard left with token resistance.

   They now know differently. They didn’t just lose a year, they squandered most of their political capital, and after November their FDR dreams will be entirely dead.

7. Robert Kagan has an op/ed in today’s WaPo in which he says Obama and the right are coming together on foreign policy, but I don’t believe it.

   expat: I look forward to reading the Kagan piece when it’s online. He’s usually good.

   If Obama is moving closer to the right on foreign policy, it will only be because, like the KSM trial, he has no choice.

   I suspect the greatest damage Obama will do will be in foreign policy and the most likely candidate there is the Iranian bomb.

8. It’s just part of the left’s strategy to get Dems and Obama re-elected. They look at what the polls show most people are upset about, publicize and change of plans. This disarms the opposition to think “maybe these people aren’t so bad after all; they listened to us.”

   Then after the election, re-instate the original plan, or do something else radical they were afraid to try before getting re-elected.

   I hope the voters don’t get taken in by these schemes, but they probably will. But you’re doing your part, neo, to inform them! Thanks.

9. Occam’s Beard is sitting prettier this week on his prediction that Eric Holder will leave office soon.

   I didn’t bet that way but I’d like to see it.

   Go, OB, go!

10. Requiring the Federal government to try KSM is not “caving” to terrorists, but demanding the power of government remain within the constraints of the Bill of Rights.

    Remember — we have a socialist Chief Executive who claims the power to designate any American as an enemy combatant.

    Let’s not cheer the further weakening of our protections from Federal tyranny.

11. expat, I fully agree with your comment that it’s scary that Obama is incompetent at understanding the implications of his positions. Scarier still, he’s incompetent at simply understanding how things work — basic, everyday things within the grasp of most people — or even at understanding that he doesn’t understand. For example, here he is, talking about car insurance at the “bipartisan” health care summit:

    “When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company – let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance. Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer.”

    The ignorance he revealed by telling this story is breathtaking. Now, I think it’s perfectly understandable that as a young kid fresh from college, buying his first car, he didn’t understand the difference between liability insurance and comprehensive collision insurance. But after this happened, he went to law school, he taught law, he presumably owned several cars and bought insurance on them, he became a state legislator, a federal legislator, and then President of the United States — and he still doesn’t understand it! He still thinks that it was somehow the evil unnamed insurer’s fault that he couldn’t get his car fixed — rather than the result of his own free choice not to pay for comprehensive collision coverage on a “beat up old car” that probably wasn’t worth what the premiums would have cost him.

    And, plainly, he still has no clue what automobile liability insurance is. He thinks it is not “serious insurance” and is “set up not to actually provide insurance” but just to “meet legal requirements.” He doesn’t seem to have asked himself what those legal requirements are or why they might exist. He doesn’t appear to understand that liability coverage is completely different from collision coverage and exists, not to protect HIM as collision coverage does, but to protect OTHERS from him and from accidents that his car might cause. In fact, he seems to think that the goal of protecting others from the cost of injuries that he might cause in a car accident is less “serious” than the goal of protecting him from having to pay for his own car repairs.

    Scariest of all, he does not know that he does not know these things. He stood up in a room full of legislators, in front of a battery of TV cameras, and blathered on to the nation about this as if he thought he was making an amazingly insightful point. This guy is about to reform our whole system of health insurance, not to mention 1/6 of our economy, and this is the level of his understanding of how insurance works?

    This little speech finished off, once and for all, any faint remaining notion I might still have possessed that Obama is actually the brilliantly intelligent man we were told about during his campaign. This is a Harvard Law School-trained attorney who does not understand liability insurance. That is staggering. The average cashier at WalMart understands car insurance better than that!

12. Posted this news item OT on the other thread. Obama & Co. are clearly greasing up the left for the inevitable climbdown: military tribunals at Gitmo. Leftists’ heads will explode (or more likely, implode) all over the nation. Memo to self: top up popcorn supply.

    Go, OB, go!

    Money in the bank, hux, money in the bank… /g

13. This little speech finished off, once and for all, any faint remaining notion I might still have possessed that Obama is actually the brilliantly intelligent man we were told about during his campaign. This is a Harvard Law School-trained attorney who does not understand liability insurance.

    Agreed. I’ve doubted all along that Obama is that bright. He evinces zero evidence of it, not in mode of expression (syntax, vocabulary), logical facility, level of abstract reasoning (drawing connections between superficially unrelated concepts), historical, philosophical, or literary allusions (illusions don’t count). But it’s shocking that a lawyer (apparently not a very good one) doesn’t understand such a basic business transaction as purchasing liability insurance. Does his grasp of contract law extend beyond pinkie swear?

    Obama seems like the product of some latter-day Henry Higgins (*cough*George Soros*cough*) trying to win a bet that he could get a complete doofus elected President. (Let’s hope his goal was a benign as winning a bet.) If so, he clearly won.

    My image of Obama is more like that of Cruiser in the classic movie Stripes:

    Cruiser: I joined the army ’cause my father and my brother were in the army. I thought I’d better join before I got drafted.
    Sergeant Hulka: Son, there ain’t no draft no more.
    Cruiser: There was one?

14. OB, here’s $5 that says Holder is still in office Jan 1, 2011.

    Indecisiveness, thy name is “Obama.”

15. Oblio, fair enough. You’re on.

16. Perhaps the history buffs here can help…

    I can’t remember an Attorney General or major Cabinet member being forced out in the first couple years of a presidency unless there were some serious impropriety.

    How does it look if Obama throws Holder under the bus this year?

    I think that it might look like the wheels are coming off the Obama administration and for that reason, among others, I suspect that Obama will be loathe to get rid of Holder.

17. I can’t remember an Attorney General or major Cabinet member being forced out in the first couple years of a presidency unless there were some serious impropriety.

    Hux, the applicability of precedent to this President is debatable. I can’t remember a President associating with a straight-up communist (Van Jones) or a full-on pervert (Kevin Jennings), or an admitted terrorist (Bill Ayers), yet here we are.

    How does it look if Obama throws Holder under the bus this year?

    Oh, about the same as it looked after Obama went to Copenhagen to importune 1) the Europeans for the Olympics, and 2) the Chinese for an audience, and both times came back with carrot greens hanging out of his sorry butt.

    You’re presuming that Obama has the intelligence to anticipate the reaction to Holder’s dismissal. Was any of that intelligence in evidence when he quacked about Skip Jones? Or signed off on the KSM decision? (And for any lurking lefties, yes, the Messiah most certainly did sign off on it; who would allow such a momentous decision to be made in his name without review?)

    Bottom line: Holder’s position is untenable. The KSM trial will end up a military tribunal at Gitmo, and someone will have to carry the can for the climbdown. Sooner or later, “pursuing other interests” or “spending more time with his family” or some other opportunity will exert its siren call on young Holder.

    I’m betting sooner. By the first Tuesday in November, to be specific.

18. Occam’s Beard: I doubt that Obama’s rebuffs on the Olympics and Climate Change were noticed much by everyday Americans. Presidents go overseas and return empty-handed often enough.

    But to cashier your own Attorney General for incompetence, that gets noticed and sets up the expectation for more such events.

    Bush didn’t accept Rumsfeld’s resignation until after the 2006 midterm disaster. AG Gonzalez went the year after that.

    It’s so early in Obama’s term for him to start shedding top level staff.

19. The Robert Kagan article mentioned by expat is here:

    WaPo article by Robert Kagan

20. Don’t underestimate the importance of race. Van Jones is black. The social secretary who got canned last week is black. Holder is black. Obama can’t flush the three of them back to back. Some white guy has to go next. Gibbs?

21. OB, we need for Bonnie Jean to hold the stakes.

22. …we may be seeing the reestablishment of the informal and unspoken alliance between liberal interventionist Democrats and hawkish internationalist Republicans that provided working majorities throughout much of the Cold War and again during the Clinton years.

    — Robert Kagan

    Thanks for the link, J.L.

    Hmm. I suspect that Kagan is writing wishfully, pointing out common ground and necessary policy for effective American foreign policy. In so doing Kagan hopes to influence the Obama administration.

    But it won’t come naturally to the Obami, if at all. Obama was dragged into his Afghanistan commitment after eight months of dithering and Hillary Clinton is only now beginning to realize that endless engagement will not deter an Iranian bomb.

23. huxley, perhaps you are right, and Bob is trying to plant a useful a useful idea in the minds of people who don’t have a compass to help them chart a course.

    On the other hand, I think the administration does have a compass. To repeat myself from the Falklands thread:

    My working hypothesis for Obama’s Master Narrative is that he is a Decolonialist/Multiculturalist. This predicts that on any issue in foreign affairs, Obama will start from an orthodox, academic decolonialist and multiculturalist perspective and then spin and trim to fit domestic political realities.

    So far, a policy of apology and appeasement has netted precisely zero for the administration, if not less than zero. The consequences of showing weakness in foreign policy are becoming an unacceptable political risk at home, as Obama beginning to look more and more like Jimmy Carter redux. Therefore, expect pragmatic tactics to deal with some situations (like Gitmo and the KSM trial) when the time available for procrastination runs out.

24. huxley Says:

    
    Perhaps the history buffs here can help…

    I can’t remember an Attorney General or major Cabinet member being forced out in the first couple years of a presidency unless there were some serious impropriety.
    

    I spent some time thinking of examples of this. The two biggies that I can think of are Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig (resigned July 5, 1982), and Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (resigned December 15, 1993).

    I’m offering that for informational purposes. I’m not sure of any implications one can derive from that. Right now, I’m very much in a non-thinking mode. (Although, the fact that I can remember Haig and Aspin shows that I may think a little too much sometimes… or that I need to find something else to occupy my time! LOL)

25. Let me expand a bit on my comment that Holder’s position is/will be untenable.

    The point is that if a superior publicly countermands an important decision by a subordinate, then that subordinate loses authority over his subordinates. Why should they solicit the boss’s views, which are at best only advisory until confirmed by his boss?

    Imagine the position of DoJ attorneys if Holder says “X” and then Obama later decides “not X.” Should the DoJ attorneys, say, charge KSM with crime Y and/or crime Z? Holder says Y. The DoJ attorneys look at each other, cough nervously, and shuffle their feet, all the while thinking, “That’s nice that you think so, Eric. But we want to find out what The Man thinks before we do anything, so we don’t get wrongfooted.”

    That’s why Holder’s position is/will be untenable if/when Obama overrules him. Holder’s decisions will carry no more weight than UN declarations. At that point, he serves no purpose as AG.

26. I suspect that Holder’s political soulmates at DOJ will understand that Holder has been in step with Obama all the way, and that if Obama overrules Holder, it will be for tactical, political reasons they will all understand and support. So Holder won’t lose face.

    You would normally be right, OB, but we aren’t dealing with normal people in normal times.

27. Occam’s Beard: except, does that principle still hold when everyone knows it wasn’t merely Holder’s opinion in the first place that is now being overruled by Obama, but that Holder and Obama were completely on the same page to begin with and that Obama’s reversal is merely strategic and political? That Holder is the fall guy for Obama’s original bad decision as well as his own?

28. Oblio: I just noticed that you said the same thing I did.

29. neo-neocon: Great minds and all that. So will you hold the stakes for our bet?

30. My working hypothesis for Obama’s Master Narrative is that he is a Decolonialist/Multiculturalist.

    Oblio: I like that! That’s been my thinking when it came to Obama’s bowing and his snubs and worse of the UK.

    I’ll try that one on more generally.

31. I spent some time thinking of examples of this. The two biggies that I can think of are Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig (resigned July 5, 1982), and Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (resigned December 15, 1993).

    J.L.: Great work!

    Here’s what Time said about Haig’s resignation:

    He had been worn down by incessant friction with colleagues–much of it self-created–in the unending battle for the President’s ear, and he had said he would quit so many times that the threat of resignation had become a Washington joke.

    Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925497,00.html#ixzz0hRqxI76V

32. I suspect that Holder’s political soulmates at DOJ will understand that Holder has been in step with Obama all the way, and that if Obama overrules Holder, it will be for tactical, political reasons they will all understand and support. So Holder won’t lose face.

    Nope, he’ll lose his job instead. /g

    Here’s my reasoning. You’re absolutely right that everyone will know that it was Obama’s own lousy judgment on display. But in the normal course of events, someone evincing such poor judgment would indubitably be canned. If Obama doesn’t can Holder, he unmistakably takes ownership of what was putatively Holder’s decision. Obama will have to can Holder simply to maintain the fiction that it was Holder’s decision. Obama & Co. are already teeing Holder up. He’s got to take one for the team.

    Consider the late, unlamented USSR (an apposite model, for any number of reasons). Lousy grain harvest? It can’t be because of Dear Leader’s ineptitude, or the lousy economic system, or even lousy weather. Just to maintain appearances, somebody has to play the role of the virgin who gets thrown into the volcano.

    That Holder is the fall guy for Obama’s original bad decision as well as his own?

    neo, I don’t know. I suspect that the operative phrase is “fall guy,” but of course I could be wrong.

    So will you hold the stakes for our bet?

    No need, Oblio, my friend. I’d be happy to buy you a drink right here and now, and another on election night, win, lose, or draw!

33. In fact, if we kick Boxer’s funky hindquarters out of the Senate that night, I’ll buy everybody here a drink!

34. Maybe if Holder gets the sack soon enough, he will be available to represent Adam Gadahn pro bono.

35. I seldom drop responses, but I browsed some of the remarks on this page neo-neocon »
    Blog Archive » Obama and Holder reversal: will it be
    a military trial for KSM after all?. I actually do have
    some questions for you if it’s allright. Could it be only me or does it look like like a few of these
    comments appear like they are written by brain dead folks?

    😛 And, if you are posting on other online sites, I would like to
    keep up with anything fresh you have to post. Would you post a
    list of every one of your social networking pages like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?

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