Members of Kansas’ congressional delegation wrote an angry letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter last Friday.
The Pentagon, they charged, secretly spent money to identify potential sites where prisoners now being held at Guantanamo Bay could be imprisoned on American soil. One of the sites studied was Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The problem with this expenditure is not that it is a large sum — it is actually quite small — but that it is explicitly forbidden by law. The 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Obama signed, specifically states that none of the money appropriated to the Department of Defense may be used to “transfer, release, or assist in the transfer or release” of Guantanamo detainees “to or within the United States, its territories, or possessions.”
As the letter notes, any expenditure greater than zero “is following neither the letter nor the spirit of the law.” According to a document reluctantly divulged by the Pentagon after a year-long Freedom of Information lawsuit by Kansas’ attorney general, the federal government spent more than $25,000 to carry on with Obama’s wishes. It’s flatly illegal for the Pentagon to spend so much as a wooden nickel for this purpose, but our sovereign wishes it, so it is done.
This is not the first time Obama has broken a law that he himself signed. The president has done the same in the areas of education and healthcare, to name just two examples.
But this story is especially interesting because it connects two threads that extend all the way back through his two terms in office: His meaningless obsession with closing the prison at Gitmo, and his contempt for the other co-equal branches of government.
Obama is fixated on the purely symbolic act of closing Guantanamo, but relocation of enemy combatants would create the precedent of holding people indefinitely on American soil without charges or trial. The idea that closing the prison has any public relations value is illusory; the jihadist war against us began long before the prison opened and will continue whether or not it closes.
The latter concern, Obama’s contempt for Congress, is far more troubling. The president has repeatedly lost in court, and often lost unanimously before the Supreme Court, after making spurious arguments for increased executive power at the expense of the legislature. One famous and risible case occurred when he tried to assert that he, and not the Congress itself, is the final arbiter of whether or not Congress is in recess.
His arrogance shines through each time he issues an executive order or action that places his personal will above the law — above the immigration laws, above Iran sanctions laws and above the requirement that he receive congressional approval before or shortly after starting a war.
In the coming presidential debates, questions must be posed to the candidates to reveal whether they will emulate Obama or repair the constitutional damage wrought by his egregious behavior. In the meantime, the Obama administration owes it to the voters of Kansas and every other state to come clean about why it is breaking the law by spending money to relocate terrorists.
