The Art Of The Deal: Gitmo and DADT

Adam Serwer alerts us to this little gentlemen's agreement:

Thanks to Lynn Sweet, we now know who was responsible for placing the ban on federal funds for federal criminal trials of Guantanamo detainees in the National Defense Authorization Act. It was the Illinois Republican delegation, concerned about the rather remote possibility that the Obama administration would ultimately be moving detainees to the designated "Gitmo North" Thompson former correctional facility. In fact, the ban is almost a non-sequitur in this regard, except in the sense that it makes it more difficult to close Gitmo, both by banning trials and making voluntary transfers to countries with "known recidivists" conditional on the approval of the Secretary of Defense.

That's not the whole story though. Jen DiMascio reports that the Democrats acquiesced to the ban as part of a deal to go forward with repealing DADT:

That might have alienated liberals like Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), but he spoke on the House floor in support of the bill. Frank told POLITICO agreeing to ban detainee transfers was part of a larger House-Senate compromise that also involved passing "don’t ask don’t tell."

“I didn’t like that,” Frank said of the detainee transfer ban. But passing the bill to allow gays to serve openly in the military was more important, he said, adding that the detainee language would have returned in a spending bill. “We would have gotten stuck with that anyway.”

I don't know whether the administration blessed this deal. But as frustrating as the ban is, I'm not sure I wouldn't have exchanged a year without federal criminal trials of Gitmo detainees during a period when the White House was unlikely to bring any regardless, for the end of DADT. A frustrating setback for justice in return for an irreversible milestone on the road to equality for gays and lesbians?

So the Republicans got Gitmo in exchange for repealing DADT:  keeping one bad set of civil rights violations for a few people on the books in exchange for repealing another set that potentially affects thousands.  I'm really not sure how I feel about that, other than it's a hard decision to make, and given the circumstances I think the Dems made the right choice.

Having said that, one has to be infuriated that the Republicans were allowed to frame the deal in those terms and get away with it completely.  Still, correcting one of those 235 year problems does trump correcting a 9 year problem.

Republican math sucks.  And what made the Democrats once again believe the Republicans would honor this deal?  They didn't the first time around.  Both of these measures, the DADT repeal and the ban on money for civilian trials of Gitmo suspects, were in the same military appropriations bill on the House side.  Then Senate Republicans stripped the DADT repeal from the bill in the Senate.  They reneged again, and it took a stand-alone bill and more deals to get that through.  That only happened after the GOP went back on their word.

I wonder what the price was for the stand-alone DADT measure to pass.  Killing the DREAM Act?  Who knows.

Either way, you'd think the Democrats would have figured out by now that Republicans can't be trusted.