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Both Houses have now passed the 2012 Defense Authorization Bill. The president, having dropped his veto threat, will sign it today. That’s too bad.
Authorization bills, keep in mind, are
essentially a collection of restrictions and permissions slips for
appropriations. In practice, however, budgeteers and appropriators have
more say over how we spend. So while authorizers share responsibility
for our bloated military spending, I’ll save my customary complaints on that topic for the appropriations bill and focus here on the new policies this bill sets.
On the positive side, the bill creates several reporting requirements
that slightly aid future efforts to trim our military ambitions and
spending. It requires the Pentagon to look at accelerating the minor
drawdown in nuclear weapons required by the New Start Treaty. Another
report is to examine options for shrinking our ballistic missile
submarine fleet, which could save
several hundred billion dollars annually. The bill also requires the
administration to produce “independent” studies of overseas basing costs
and opportunities for savings. These reports are not likely to
themselves promote much change, but they might serve as ammunition for
those that do.
A little-noted problem with the bill is that it authorizes the shift
of base Pentagon spending to the Overseas Contingency Operations
account—the war account. Because the Budget Control Act caps military
spending but not war funding, costs shifted from the former to the
latter reduce the cuts needed to get under the caps, creating an illusion of savings. Appropriators are trying
to protect around $10 billion in base defense costs for 2012 using this
ploy. Analysts are still figuring how big a shift in funds the
authorization bill endorses. But as Taxpayers for Common Sense has noted, the answer is at least several billion.
The most odious aspect of this bill is
its detention provisions. These sections of the bill are confusing
because they seem to say various things that they then unsay. Section
1021 requires the president to place al Qaeda members and their
associates, with the exception of American citizens, in military custody
and deny them civilian trial. It then destroys this “requirement” by
letting the president waive it and claim that it serves “national
security interests.” Section 1022 affirms that the president has the
authority under the 2001 Authorization of Military Force to detain
without trial anyone who belongs to al Qaeda or the Taliban, or
associates of those groups who are engaged in hostilities with the
United States. Language further down in the section insists that this
affirmation does not “limit or expand” the president’s authority or
endorse his claimed power to seize suspected terrorists in the United
States and deprive them of trials.
What that compromise
language section leaves us with—beyond a further muddying of the legal
waters—is a punt. The offense to civil liberties is less what the bill
does than what it doesn’t: deny that the president can arbitrarily
detain without trial anyone he decides is al Qaeda or its helper. So
when congressional leaders dismiss
civil liberty concerns about the legislation by saying it “merely
codifies current law,” one response is that that’s exactly the problem.
But as I noted
the other day, it isn’t clear that Congress’s efforts here to keep its
hand off current law will entirely succeed. Federal courts hearing cases
questioning the constitutionality of war powers, including the
president’s right to detain people, tend to consider
whether Congress has endorsed or rejected the power in question. Judges
may take all this throat-clearing as a tacit endorsement of the
president’s claims, making them more likely to survive constitutional
scrutiny. The question is not whether there is damage to civil liberties
here, but how bad it is.
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