Can Congress Step Up On Security?
President Obama has invited legislators to play an expanded role in devising the legal strategy for confronting terrorism.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
by Ronald Brownstein
National Journal
The sweeping national security speech that President Obama delivered at the National Archives earlier this month offered Congress a challenge in the form of an invitation.
On several contentious issues, Obama invited legislators to play an expanded role in devising the legal strategy for confronting terrorism -- an approach that renounced President George W. Bush's attempt to keep authority over those decisions within the executive branch. The challenge implicit in Obama's invitation is that Congress must responsibly share the political risks inherent in balancing liberty and security during the age of global terror. On that, the jury remains out.
Obama so far has pursued a characteristically nuanced attempt to recalibrate Bush's anti-terrorism strategy. On some questions -- for example, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and banning "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- Obama is either repudiating Bush's decisions or accelerating Bush's second-term transition away from hard-line tactics. In other areas, such as retaining the possibility of indefinite detention for some people who have never been tried, Obama is proposing more continuity than his supporters expected.
(More here.)
Saturday, May 30, 2009
by Ronald Brownstein
National Journal
The sweeping national security speech that President Obama delivered at the National Archives earlier this month offered Congress a challenge in the form of an invitation.
On several contentious issues, Obama invited legislators to play an expanded role in devising the legal strategy for confronting terrorism -- an approach that renounced President George W. Bush's attempt to keep authority over those decisions within the executive branch. The challenge implicit in Obama's invitation is that Congress must responsibly share the political risks inherent in balancing liberty and security during the age of global terror. On that, the jury remains out.
Obama so far has pursued a characteristically nuanced attempt to recalibrate Bush's anti-terrorism strategy. On some questions -- for example, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and banning "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- Obama is either repudiating Bush's decisions or accelerating Bush's second-term transition away from hard-line tactics. In other areas, such as retaining the possibility of indefinite detention for some people who have never been tried, Obama is proposing more continuity than his supporters expected.
(More here.)
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