Please Tell Me More About How It Was Obama Who Failed To Close Gitmo

[Cha]

60. "The Left and Right Are Both Wrong About Obama’s Bergdahl Prison Swap"

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"But the Bergdahl release has resurrected an attack from the anti-Gitmo left, the notion that, if the President can use a signing statement to justify the release of these five prisoners, then he can do so for all of the Gitmo detainees. If the President can “ignore the law” in this case, then why not do the same for the rest of the detainees? MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked that very question, on behalf of anti-Gitmo activists, on his All In program Monday night, but the premise of that question relies on the same fundamental misunderstanding about signing statements that the right relies on. They’re both asserting that the President is using the signing statement to ignore the law. Here is what President Obama said about using signing statements in 2007, at a Montana town hall campaign event:

When Hayes played that clip last night, he cut it off when Obama said “we’re not going to use signing statements,” but the rest of that sentence is “as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.”

The President’s NDAA signing statement doesn’t do that, it seeks to preserve the will of Congress, with a very narrow, well-defined exception. The test of that exception isn’t settled by the signing statement, it is settled by the U.S. Constitution, and if it is challenged, by the Supreme Court. No one has said that the Bergdahl swap would not withstand such a challenge, but a wholesale release of Gitmo detainees likely would not.

http://thedailybanter.com/2014/06/right-left-attack-obama-signing-statement-rationale-bowe-bergdahl-swap/