National Defense Authorization Act

Over the last week or so there has been a lot of news on the interwebz regarding the National Defense Authorization Act and its proposal to more or less indefinitely hold citizens as terrorists.  I have found this entire event extremely fascinating as I look back on where we came from, The Patriot Act, until today.  Back then the Patriot Act was highly controversial but democrats couldn't really do anything to stop it and the sentiment of the populous was divided too with one side shaming the other and the other side dropping Nazi references left and right (hah, left and right).    Fast forward to today and you have the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an american born muslim who renounced his citizenship and declared war on the country with al-qaeda.  During this entire time we have detainees in Guantanamo who, it is argued, cannot be let out because they will just attack again, but they have never seen a trial.  Fast Forward to this last week and the culmination of all of this is the proposal to be able to detain American Citizens indefinitely.  The cable media response to this was completely absent as they focused on the fall of the illustrious womanizer Herman Cain and the print media who, to their credit, did report it, were surprisingly lax in doing so.  I watched all week, fairly ambivalent to it, as my friends repeatedly posted things about it on facebook.  Now, when I say ambivalent I do not mean that I had no position.  I was against the patriot act in its inception, I am in favor of trials for the Guantanamo bay detainees because everyone is entitled to due process, even if they aren't citizens.  To do otherwise would be to claim non-americans are of less value to the world.  But at the same time, I support the drone strike on Al-Awlaki only because he renounced citizenship.  Following the train of thought that leads to those positions, you would probably guess correctly that I am vehemently against this bill, and I am.  In the end though, I was not worried because the bill was essentially doomed to failure.  The white house had come out many times and told the Senate that if the bill made it to the president's desk that he would veto it no matter what.  Well at the end of last week, the bill finally passed.  I figured it would be a fairly close vote with national security republicans crossing borders to join democrats but no, the tally was a staggering 93-7.  Amongst those 93 yes's and 7 no's there wasn't really a party line.  Looking at that line you would think that most of the country supported the bill, but that was not the case.  The non-media populous was furious the specific amendment was even proposed.  The media ignored the populous, the senators ignored the populous and in the end, the bills passing didn't get a drop of major news coverage.

Now, I'm still not terribly worried the thing will ever make it into law, because of the President's veto power, and I'm not sure how the house will vote either, but that 93/100 is more than high enough percentage to over rule the veto in the senate, which is mildly alarming.  But my favorite part of all this, Tom Harkin, Senator from Iowa, someone who's political career I have followed my entire life, voted no.  When I went to see the vote list yesterday, and I saw that, I was proud to be an Iowan.  As proud as I was when I woke up on my birthday not so long ago to find out that an Iowa court had declared Gay Marriage legal in my beloved home state.  This is one of the reasons I tease my friends, who are almost all from Nebraska, that Iowa is a better state.  All Nebraska has is Omaha, which I love, but Iowa has Tom Harkin.  Iowa has center-liberalism without the far-left insanity you see other places.  Iowa made Tom Vilsack.  Iowa will forever have my heart.