Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial. What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.
You're supporting the point of the person you responded to.
One vote isn't enough. Just Obama was insufficient when congress was not sufficiently aligned.
That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
No, they refuted their strawman.
This is far too nihilist.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.
That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.
I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)