One of the great blessings of politics is that it allows us to negotiate solutions to intractable problems, to cooperate, to make deals, to compromise so that all sides of a dispute can get something of what they want, even if they lose something in the process.
In the deal cut by Senate Republicans and the White House over the president’s interrogation bill, it’s difficult to see what the White House lost. Despite changes in the language, President Bush will still be allowed to redefine the terms of the Geneva Conventions for all practical purposes when he orders the CIA to interrogate prisoners, and classified information can still be kept from prisoners facing trial based on that evidence. On a first reading of the deal, what chiefly seems to have been gained by the Senate is deniability. They are not officially giving the president approval to redefine the Geneva Conventions, but he can effectively do so at his discretion.
I’ll post more on this as analysis comes in, but read the coverage in the Times (Kate Zernike, Republicans Reach a Deal on Detainee Bill, 9/22/06), the WaPo (R. Jeffrey Smith and Charles Babbington, White House, Senators Near Pact on Interrogation Rules, 9/22/06) and the LAT (Julian Barnes and Richard Simon, Bush Bows to Senators on Detainees, 9/22/06) whose headline, at least, sees Bush as capitulating more than the other papers do. Editorials in the Times and the WaPo are both strongly critical of the compromise.
What this deal appears to do is clear the way for approval of Bush’s bill before members of Congress go home to campaign. If Democrats vote with them, Republicans can claim a bipartisan victory for Bush. If Democrats vote against the bill, they can be cast as soft on terror and weak on defense – precisely the outcome Bush and Rove had hoped for in bringing up this issue now. Public opinion polls show that their effort to change the subject to national defense has shown some success as Republican fortunes have improved somewhat (at least, depending on which polls you read.)
Stay tuned….