Obama, Bush, & FDR: Together Again

Writing in the Wash Post, Brookings' Benjamin Wittes and Harvard's Jack Goldsmith are disappointed with President Barack Obama's unilateralist view on detaining suspected terrorists. They worry that he is simply following George W. Bush's bad precedent:

Obama, to put it bluntly, seems poised for a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration's unilateral approach to detention. The attraction is simple, seductive and familiar. The legal arguments for unilateralism are strong in theory; past presidents in shorter, traditional wars did not seek specific congressional input on detention. Securing such input for our current war, it turns out, is still hard. The unilateral approach, by contrast, lets the president define the rules in ways that are convenient for him and then dares the courts to say no.

The authors suggest that Obama follow FDR's lead by getting congressional input instead:

When Franklin D. Roosevelt sought congressional authorization for the Lend-Lease program in January 1941, the isolationist-leaning nation was evenly split over the proposal. After two months of sharp congressional argument and national debate, almost two-thirds of the country supported Lend-Lease, and Congress passed the program by large margins. "We have just now engaged in a great debate," Roosevelt proclaimed. "It was not limited to the halls of Congress. It was argued in every newspaper, on every wavelength, over every cracker barrel in all the land; and it was finally settled and decided by the American people themselves. Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at. But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt."

It's really great to argue for more input when it comes to all aspects of war, especially the waging of it in the first place. Wittes and Goldsmith seem incredibly naive, however, in presuming that Congress is champing at the bit to make any hard decisions. Recall that Congress did vote on an authorization of force; recall also that Congress has shied away from actually declaring war for many decades now. They might not like some aspects of the Imperial Presidency, but they are also cowards when it comes to the sort of decisions that they might actually be held accountable for.

In any case, citing FDR in this context strikes me a tin-eared to the extreme. Didn't he use an executive order to intern what, 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? That was a unilateralist action that had moral support in Congress, sure, but was far worse than anything Bush or Obama dreamed up, much less acted on. The order was also refused by Mountain State governors, to their credit. Read Eric Muller's great Reason piece on that racially driven hysterical legacy of FDR.

And watch Reason.tv on Obama's bad rendition and detention policies, which have roots not only in the Bush admin but in Bill Clinton's: