Following up on our post this morning about continued Congressional recalcitrance on the administration’s (non-existent) plan to close the detention camp at Gitmo, Republicans send around this report from the Hill that finds it’s not just the White House that’s in complete disarray on this issue:
White House delays in producing a plan for transferring detainees out of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are starting to wear on House Democrats, who are showing increasing disarray over how to handle the issue. House Democratic leaders have been staying quiet on the issue as President Barack Obama crafts a plan to close the beleaguered facility in January. But continued delays by the administration could have consequences for vulnerable Democrats, some of whom are growing agitated as the clock keeps ticking. “There is some concern just politically about this,” one senior Democratic aide said. The more time that goes by without a plan from Obama, the aide said, the more likely Republicans will engage in “scaremongering” and attack Democrats for “inviting terrorists into our backyard.”
And then Clyburn:
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) downplayed any intraparty agitating over the issue. “There’s no divide in the Democratic Party on this issue,” Clyburn said. “The whole issue of the defense of the nation, that’s an issue that we deal with a whole lot. We have not taken a position on Gitmo.”
I thought Democrats had a pretty clear position on Gitmo: they want it closed. Or at least they did when Bush was still president and the little problem of what to do with the detainees after it closed was his problem — not theirs. Now they don’t even have a position. Keep it open, close it down, whatever — as long as they don’t have to take a tough vote on it. What was once a great matter of principle and a vital requirement of the war against al Qaeda has become an issue on which Democrats “have not taken a position.”
