Down Goes the Inhofe Amendment! (Thanks to You)

November 17, 2009  |  Posted by Danielle Belton

Ding dong, another GOP Gitmo stall tactic is dead.

The Inhofe Amendment, meant to deny funding to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States, went down in defeat in the Senate today. On a vote of 57-43, Sen. James Inhofe’s efforts to tie the hands of the president went to the same political graveyard as Sen. Lindsay Graham’s Gitmo transfer fund denying amendment of two weeks ago. And this time there were three more Senators joining the effort to shoot down this latest act of GOP obfuscation.

Sen. Inhofe claimed that he had proposed this amendment twice before and that it was supported overwhelmingly by the Senate. (Too bad, so sad for him it’s been cut from one bill and could be stripped from another.) The times, they are a-changing, Sen. Inhofe.

Just this fall, Sen. Inhofe was able to pass the same exact amendment as part of a defense appropriations bill with a whopping 93 to 7 – a near unanimous vote. This time he wasn’t even able to muster a simple majority, only getting 43 votes. More than HALF of the Senate rejected his attempts to deny justice for 9/11 victims. What’s different this time?

1. Unlike the previous vote, the Obama Administration weighed in. Attorney General Eric Holder and Secys. Robert Gates of Defense and Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security wrote today that “We need to get on with the work of enhancing our national security by finally closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.”
2. YOU weighed in. Literally thousands of people responded to our appeal to oppose the Inhofe Amendment.
3. A wide network of organizations and their members weighed in, including VoteVets.org, Human Rights First, the National Security Network, the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Constitution Project and many others.

Scare tactics, like the ones Sen. Inhofe often invokes on the Senate floor, are being defeated by the truth and a rapidly expanding number of truth tellers.

Terrorists have been tried on U.S. soil before, 195 times, in fact, since 2001. Remarkably there was not a peep out of the right wing any of those 195 times. Perhaps they once believed in our justice system then and recently came down with a bad case of Legal Amnesia. Or maybe it was because most of those trials happened during the Bush Administration and they supported them? Hypocrisy or Legal Amnesia!? There are really only two ways to go here.

I’m leaning a bit on the hypocrite side, myself.

But this isn’t the first or the last time the right wing is going to rear their head, screaming bloody murder, in their efforts to keep Guantanamo open by any means necessary. That means more amendments, more bills, more scare tactics and more distortions. Put your fear flack jackets and helmets on because we’ve got incoming.

Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted here on the blog.

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