Spencer Ackerman says Obama shouldn't sign an executive order defying the ban on federal funding for criminal trials of Gitmo detainees:
The bottom line here is that Obama lost an argument about Guantanamo Bay. He's on his way to losing a more extensive argument about civilian trials. Neither has to stay lost. But the right venue for picking that fight is in public, in Congress, in the open.
The ban only lasts a year and has to be renewed, but it's not easy to see the politics of closing Gitmo getting any easier between now and then, or the Republican House letting through a bill that appropriates funds for those transfers.
Charlie Savage, who literally wrote the book on this stuff, reports that during the Bush administration, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo that Congress couldn't restrict the president's authority over how to handle the transfer of detainees--then retracted it five days before the end of the second term. Bush asserted the "inherent" authority to disregard over 1200 laws during his administration. The question here is whether getting marginally closer to removing one of the last administration's most harmful legacies is worth strengthening another one.
