Close Guantanamo Protest 6-26-13

Close Guantanamo Protest 6-26-13 © Jo Freeman

Jo Freeman writes: “Most of the press seems to have overlooked this protest in front of the White House. The Supreme Court decisions had been released only two hours previously, so they were elsewhere.” Freeman, though, was there. Here is her report, illuminating a persistent protest against the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in solidarity with the camp’s hunger strikers . -Jeff

Code Pink co-founder Diane Wilson climbed over the White House fence on Wednesday as part of the ongoing campaign to get President Obama to close Guantanamo. Once over, she stood about five feet from the fence as three armed uniformed Secret Service approached with rifles and a snarling dog. Told to GET DOWN, she was handcuffed and hauled off to jail. The audacity of her feat was enhanced by the fact that she is in the 57th day of a fast in solidarity with the Guantanamo hunger strikers. Unlike the 104 men refusing to eat at Guantanamo, Wilson is not being force fed.

This is not Wilson’s first challenge to White House security. On May 10th she had her neck attached to the White House fence with a special bicycle lock during another Code Pink demonstration. It took the cops two hours to free her neck from the fence. She was arrested, fined $70 and released.

Her latest feat occurred after a noontime rally put together by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in Pennsylvania Plaza. The backdrop to the speakers featured sympathizers in orange jump suits holding the names of those still being held in Guantanamo.

After the rally, participants and observers congregated on the sidewalk in front of the White House for a street theater re-enactment of an “enteral feeding.” Tighe Barry of CodePink pretended to strap “Shraf Masud” of Yemen into a chair and feed him (actually her). Barry usually gets . . .

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Bipartisanship’s Last Stand: What does the Debt Deal mean for Legislators?

US Capitol Building at night © 2006 Diliff | Wikimedia Commons

Like many, I have serious reservations about elements of the debt deal. But from a standpoint concerned only with the legislative process, the debate in Washington has not been “business as usual.” In recent months we have witnessed two primary, parallel attempts at compromise: The “Gang of 6” in the Senate, and the Obama-Boehner-Cantor talks at The White House. To me, the failure of the “Gang,” and the ultimate success of the White House talks, is a sign that our government is undergoing a significant shift in the way it legislates.

Change in the legislative paradigm is not a radical event – it has been the norm in our Congress’ history. Compromise, specifically over “perceived truths,” as Jeffrey Goldfarb notes, is the heart of the legislative process. Among the oldest approaches to compromise was John C. Calhoun’s “doctrine of the concurrent majority,” where the goal of legislation was to accommodate all ideas. During the “Golden Age,” Henry Clay championed the idea that “all legislation…is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.” Now, Obama’s inability to strike a “Grand Bargain” should not be seen as an unqualified failure; grand bargains can only be made within a legislative framework where both sides are willing to sacrifice equally, a point I will return to shortly.

Turning to the present day, we find two curious episodes in the Senate. First, we have an attempt by the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to cede portions of the Senate’s power to the Democratic President. The Senate has always fiercely defended its own sovereignty with a ferocity that can only equal debates over world-shattering policy changes. William S. White, perhaps the most eminent scholar on Senate history, noted that it is “harder to change a [standing] rule than to vote to take a country to war.” For McConnell to suggest that the Democratic president takes the reigns is a clear act of desperation, a sign that the existing framework of compromise familiar to McConnell no longer applies.

Second, we have the “Gang of 6.” . . .

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