Bad news and good news
May. 26th, 2009 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4life“We can
Each of us
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.”
-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
First the bad news: Obama wants to bring the unconstitutional policy of indefinite detention without trial home to American soil. The argument for his position, prettified with the doublespeak phrase "prolonged detention," is that "Guantánamo’s remaining 240 detainees include cold-blooded jihadists and perhaps some so warped by their experience in custody that no president would be willing to free them . . . [but] some [of them] cannot be tried, in part for lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence." The irony is palpable: we might need to keep holding some people indefinitely simply because they've grown to hate us so much for holding them indefinitely (and torturing them) that they would become dangerous terrorists if released. This despite the fact that the government can't prove (without using "tainted" evidence, i.e. deeply classified and/or obtained under torture) that their prior actions even justified detaining them in the first place.
According to the ACLU, "Mr. Obama has not made the case persuasively that there is a worrisome category of detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be convicted. The reason to have a criminal justice system at all, they say, is to trust it to decide who is guilty and who is not." In short: Terrorists are criminals. And yeah, occasionally our court system lets criminals go free by accident, including serial killers, arsonists, and other psychopaths. But there's no sense in trying to make the system perfectly safe, because there's no such thing as perfection. Our criminal justice system already ensures that these nightmare scenarios are extremely rare, while avoiding needless damage to our freedoms in the name of safety from criminals. Obama says he's the president who listens to us, and he did listen on the liquid coal issue. Now, we need to make him listen to this commonsense analysis.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is moving ahead. A few committees will try to delay it, but Henry Waxman, one of its two authors, doesn't see any obstacle to getting it onto the full House floor this summer: "'I think we have a formidable coalition behind our legislation, and I think they will see the wisdom of some of our decisions. And then we're going to talk through where we have differences and then we'll resolve them.'" Speaker Pelosi also "has said she wants to act in the House this year. Pelosi could force the legislation through the different committees by giving them time constraints and using the Rules Committee to combine the various sections." And once the bill is brought to the floor, "House Majority Whip James Clyburn . . . [said] last week that he could find the 218 votes to pass the legislation."
Now, some groups such as Greenpeace and the Energy Action Coalition (sponsor of Power Shift) say that the fossil fuel industry has already hijacked this bill, ensuring that the greenhouse-emission reduction targets aren't good enough and the offset allowances will easily permit America's greenhouse emissions to keep rising (though much more slowly) for the next 20 years. But in my opinion, we are much better off passing a somewhat inadequate bill than letting it die. Once we finally have the precedent of Congressional willingness to pass real climate legislation, it will be much easier to get another one passed that will rectify those inadequacies. After all, right now it's easy to despair and presume that Big Oil and Big Coal will never let us pass a climate bill. But once it's been done before, that all changes.
Each of us
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.”
-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
First the bad news: Obama wants to bring the unconstitutional policy of indefinite detention without trial home to American soil. The argument for his position, prettified with the doublespeak phrase "prolonged detention," is that "Guantánamo’s remaining 240 detainees include cold-blooded jihadists and perhaps some so warped by their experience in custody that no president would be willing to free them . . . [but] some [of them] cannot be tried, in part for lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence." The irony is palpable: we might need to keep holding some people indefinitely simply because they've grown to hate us so much for holding them indefinitely (and torturing them) that they would become dangerous terrorists if released. This despite the fact that the government can't prove (without using "tainted" evidence, i.e. deeply classified and/or obtained under torture) that their prior actions even justified detaining them in the first place.
According to the ACLU, "Mr. Obama has not made the case persuasively that there is a worrisome category of detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be convicted. The reason to have a criminal justice system at all, they say, is to trust it to decide who is guilty and who is not." In short: Terrorists are criminals. And yeah, occasionally our court system lets criminals go free by accident, including serial killers, arsonists, and other psychopaths. But there's no sense in trying to make the system perfectly safe, because there's no such thing as perfection. Our criminal justice system already ensures that these nightmare scenarios are extremely rare, while avoiding needless damage to our freedoms in the name of safety from criminals. Obama says he's the president who listens to us, and he did listen on the liquid coal issue. Now, we need to make him listen to this commonsense analysis.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is moving ahead. A few committees will try to delay it, but Henry Waxman, one of its two authors, doesn't see any obstacle to getting it onto the full House floor this summer: "'I think we have a formidable coalition behind our legislation, and I think they will see the wisdom of some of our decisions. And then we're going to talk through where we have differences and then we'll resolve them.'" Speaker Pelosi also "has said she wants to act in the House this year. Pelosi could force the legislation through the different committees by giving them time constraints and using the Rules Committee to combine the various sections." And once the bill is brought to the floor, "House Majority Whip James Clyburn . . . [said] last week that he could find the 218 votes to pass the legislation."
Now, some groups such as Greenpeace and the Energy Action Coalition (sponsor of Power Shift) say that the fossil fuel industry has already hijacked this bill, ensuring that the greenhouse-emission reduction targets aren't good enough and the offset allowances will easily permit America's greenhouse emissions to keep rising (though much more slowly) for the next 20 years. But in my opinion, we are much better off passing a somewhat inadequate bill than letting it die. Once we finally have the precedent of Congressional willingness to pass real climate legislation, it will be much easier to get another one passed that will rectify those inadequacies. After all, right now it's easy to despair and presume that Big Oil and Big Coal will never let us pass a climate bill. But once it's been done before, that all changes.
