OK, I’m going to see if I can calm down enough to type an actual response.
President Obama signed the defense budget. That was passed in the eleventh hour as a result of extremely contentious negotiations between the Senate, more or less in the hands of grownups on both sides of the aisle, and the House of Representatives, which would turn the United States of America into a totalitarian theocracy if it could. (Hint: The House of Representatives is not controlled by the same party as the President.)
There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill. There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill in part because the GOP fascists (and I use that word deliberately; fascism is antithetical to the expressed values of the Tea Party ground troops, but it is the driving force of their puppetmasters and funders) in the House knew that it was a must-pass bill.
Now, I don’t know the specifics about the negotiations between the President and Congress over the specific indefinite detention provision you’re talking about, but I agree that that’s utterly appalling. However, I do know that Obama said he would veto an earlier version of the bill that mandated that any judicial process about civilians so held could only be conducted by military tribunals, not civilian courts. Obama insisted that the Executive Branch at least have the authority to move such detainees to civilian courts. I.e., he was threatening not to sign the bill, and let the entire military shut down,* if Congress insisted that civilians held by the military could only be tried by military tribunals and were beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts. (He also, according to my fuzzily-remembered source, insisted on removal of a provision which would have made it harder to prosecute torture of detainees.)
So, the bill he eventually signed was awful, but he spent some political capital to make it a little bit less awful.
Looking at The Wikipedia article, it looks like a lot of the controversial provisions in the bill were explicitly granting powers that W. and the hawks had previously said were implicitly granted (and also explicitly forcing the Executive to use them in certain circumstances). Obama managed to negotiate language that did not alter the status quo as much (leaving it legal for US citizens in military custody for terrorism to be transferred to civilian custody, and leaving a lot of the powers W.’s administration had de facto assumed for itself in their previous ambiguous state rather than explicitly granting them). [cont’d] [edit: minor grammar fix]
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President Obama signed the defense budget. That was passed in the eleventh hour as a result of extremely contentious negotiations between the Senate, more or less in the hands of grownups on both sides of the aisle, and the House of Representatives, which would turn the United States of America into a totalitarian theocracy if it could. (Hint: The House of Representatives is not controlled by the same party as the President.)
There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill. There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill in part because the GOP fascists (and I use that word deliberately; fascism is antithetical to the expressed values of the Tea Party ground troops, but it is the driving force of their puppetmasters and funders) in the House knew that it was a must-pass bill.
Now, I don’t know the specifics about the negotiations between the President and Congress over the specific indefinite detention provision you’re talking about, but I agree that that’s utterly appalling. However, I do know that Obama said he would veto an earlier version of the bill that mandated that any judicial process about civilians so held could only be conducted by military tribunals, not civilian courts. Obama insisted that the Executive Branch at least have the authority to move such detainees to civilian courts. I.e., he was threatening not to sign the bill, and let the entire military shut down,* if Congress insisted that civilians held by the military could only be tried by military tribunals and were beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts. (He also, according to my fuzzily-remembered source, insisted on removal of a provision which would have made it harder to prosecute torture of detainees.)
So, the bill he eventually signed was awful, but he spent some political capital to make it a little bit less awful.
Looking at The Wikipedia article, it looks like a lot of the controversial provisions in the bill were explicitly granting powers that W. and the hawks had previously said were implicitly granted (and also explicitly forcing the Executive to use them in certain circumstances). Obama managed to negotiate language that did not alter the status quo as much (leaving it legal for US citizens in military custody for terrorism to be transferred to civilian custody, and leaving a lot of the powers W.’s administration had de facto assumed for itself in their previous ambiguous state rather than explicitly granting them). [cont’d] [edit: minor grammar fix]