Guantánamo Bay, the Rise of the Courts and the Revenge of Politics
THE LONG DECADE: HOW 9/11 HAS CHANGED THE LAW, David Jenkins, Anders Henriksen & Amanda Jacobsen, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012
10 Pages Posted: 4 Dec 2011 Last revised: 28 Jan 2013
Date Written: April 4, 2012
Abstract
Although a core part of Barak Obama’s election platform, the closure of Guantánamo Bay has proven more difficult to bring about than anticipated. This difficulty has primarily emanated from the persistent opposition to closure found within the United States Congress and given practical effect through legislative measures that make closure difficult, if not impossible. Understanding this divergence between Executive policy and Congressional preferred outcomes in the national security arena requires us to ask a simple question, which lies at the core of this paper: is Congress acting in a purely political or a politically constitutionalist manner? In other words, is this merely a question of politics or is Congress using Guantánamo Bay as the site upon which to sketch its vision of the appropriate relationship between different organs of government? That question takes on an added level of resonance in the context of Guantánamo Bay because of the series of US Supreme Court cases making it clear that the detention centre there is subject to law and, more specifically, to constitutional and constitutionalist limits. In this short essay, I address this question and argue that, rather than communicating a grand constitutional message, Congressional obstructionism in this context is politics as usual and should be understood as such.
Keywords: Guantanamo Bay, Obama, War on Terror, Constitutionalism, Politics
JEL Classification: K10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation