How the GOP beat Obama on Guantanamo

President Barack Obama had ordered the Guantanamo Bay naval base closed within a year. (AP)

It took a while for people to notice, but in the last few months, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has made 16 -- yes, 16 -- speeches on the Senate floor questioning the wisdom of Barack Obama's decision to close the U.S. terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. McConnell started January 22, the day the president issued an executive order declaring that Gitmo will be closed within a year. McConnell is still going.

"Sometimes it takes a little bit of repetition for people to get the story," one Republican Senate aide says. "People weren't asking these questions back in January."

Now they are. For the moment at least, Obama has lost the Battle of Guantanamo. What began with pressure from McConnell, whose 40-member Republican caucus in the Senate has no power to enact anything by itself, has ended with the crumbling of majority Democratic support for closing Guantanamo. And that is a major defeat for Obama.

The Democratic change of heart came in the form of the Senate's decision to cancel $80 million to fund the relocation of Guantanamo prisoners. The money was to have been part of a $91.3 billion war appropriations bill that will be passed this week. But a provision in the bill, inserted by Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Daniel Inouye and Republican Sen. James Inhofe, now says that "none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this act may be used to transfer, release, or incarcerate any individual who was detained as of May 19, 2009, at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States."

If passed by the Senate, the ban will be in effect until September 30, the end of the current fiscal year. That means the Obama administration can't spend any money to make provisions for relocating the prisoners -- it can't build a new facility in the United States, can't redesign some existing facility for the job, can't do much of anything -- until October 1 at the earliest. (And that is only if Congress at that point decides to give the president the money for the job.)

Remember that the executive order specified that Guantanamo "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." That would be January 22, 2010, which now means that Obama would have at most October, November and December of this year to solve a problem that has vexed the U.S. government for a long time.

Nevertheless, the White House is standing firm behind its schedule. When asked yesterday if closing Guantanamo might take longer than planned, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs answered, "There's been no change in the date from the executive order." Gibbs said the president might be willing to working with Congress on a timeline for "asking for resources," but as far as the main goal is concerned, the White House remains inflexible.

"So that's non-negotiable, that's off the table?" a reporter asked. "This thing is being shut down in a year?"

"That's what the executive order says," Gibbs answered.

Very few people outside the White House believe that is possible, at least if it is to be done in a responsible way. That doubters now include a number of influential Democrats who have no idea what should be done with the Guantanamo prisoners but say they should not come to the United States, even to be held in U.S. prisons.

The Democrat who changed the terms of the debate is Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a decorated veteran who give the party credibility on national security issues. Last Sunday, on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Webb, who once supported closing Guantanamo, said that detainees "don't belong in our judicial system, and they don't belong in our jails."

"We spent hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases," Webb continued. "There are cases against international law. These aren't people who were in the United States committing a crime in the United States. These are people who were brought to Guantanamo for international terrorism. I do not believe they should be tried in the United States."

Other Democrats agreed with Webb, and by Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had joined them. "I think there's a general feeling…that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn't want terrorists to be released in the United States," Reid told reporters at the Capitol. When asked if that included imprisoning Guantanamo detainees in the U.S., Reid said, "If terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don't want is them to be put in prisons in the United States. We don't want them around the United States."

Reid's words just happen to fit the results of a new poll by Fox News, which asked, "If the Guantanamo Bay military prison is closed, do you think the prisoners should be transferred to prison facilities in the United States?" Fifty-five percent of those polled said no, while 37 percent said yes. Broken down by party, 68 percent of Republicans said no, as did 53 percent of independents and 46 percent of Democrats. (Twenty-seven percent of Republicans, 39 percent of independents, and 43 percent of Democrats say the prisoners should be transferred to the U.S.)

Why the turnaround in the politics of Guantanamo? Republican analysts believe the public never really focused on the issue until Obama made a firm commitment to close the prison by a certain date. That forced Democrats to actually confront the problem in a way that moved beyond campaign rhetoric. "The question for the public with Guantanamo was, 'Do you want these people here in the United States?'" says a GOP pollster. "I don't think people thought that was an option. We thought that we shut it down and they go back to where they came from. I don't think Americans had thought that through."

In addition, the Guantanamo decision comes at a time when some Senate Democrats, who have long chafed under their party's image of being soft on national security, watched with dismay as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got into a high-profile dispute with the CIA over how much the spy agency told Pelosi about harsh interrogations. "Part of it could be the Pelosi thing, and Senate Democrats got worried about their stand on defense issues and security," says the pollster. "Pelosi's comments could have contributed to the idea that Democrats have to pursue a harder line on national security."

And in the end, part of it was the sheer persistence of Mitch McConnell. Guantanamo, the Minority Leader told reporters Tuesday, is "a $200 million state-of-the-art detention facility…from which no one has escaped since 9/11." That was a pretty strong argument when decision time came around, and McConnell added, "I understand our friends on the other side of the aisle are -- shall I say? -- moving in our direction rapidly on this issue."

Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@dcexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.