Obama Signs Defense Bill Despite 'Serious Reservations'

Second, Obama’s veto threat was never about substantiv­e objections to the detention powers vested by this bill; put another way, he was never objecting to the bill on civil liberties grounds. Obama is not an opponent of indefinite detention; he’s a vigorous proponent of it, as evidenced by his continuous­, multi-face­ted embrace of that policy.

Obama’s objections to this bill had nothing to do with civil liberties, due process or the Constituti­on. It had everything to do with Executive power. The WhiteHouse­’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogat­e suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, insisted the White House, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.


Even the one substantiv­e objection the WhiteHouse expressed to the bill (mandatory military detention for accused AmericanTe­rrorists captured on US soil)  was about Executive power, not due process or core liberties. The proof of that, the definitive­, conclusive proof, is that CarlLevin has several times disclosed that it was the WhiteHouse which demanded removal of a provision in his original draft that would have exempted US citizens from military detention. In other words, this was an example of the WhiteHouse demanding greater detention powers in the bill by insisting on the removal of one of its few constraint­s (the prohibitio­n on military detention for Americans captured on US soil). That’s because the WhiteHouse­’s NorthStar on this bill was Presidenti­al discretion­: they were going to veto the bill if it contained any limits on the President’­s detention powers, regardless of whether those limits forced him to put people in military prison or barred him from doing so.

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