Feb
16
McConnell Editorial Reply in CJ
Filed Under Kentucky
Yesterday Senator McConnell responded to an Editorial in the Courier Journal.
McConnell responds to editorial
February 14, 2010
Your recent editorial (“McConnell’s course,” Feb. 7) showed a significant lack of understanding of current events and our nation’s economic and anti-terror policies.We have a deficit because our government spends too much – not because people are undertaxed. In spite of playing a continued blame game with our economic woes, in just one year this White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress ran up a deficit larger than those of the last four years of the last administration – combined. Though this editorial page did not oppose it, Washington Democrats, without a single Republican vote, passed a budget that will double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10.
On top of this spending binge, the Obama administration continues to push a 2,700-page, $2.5 trillion health spending plan. Although the administration claims it won’t raise the deficit, their own experts admit the predicted savings are “unlikely” and “unrealistic.”
While the health care and spending policies of the current Congress have been partisan exercises, Republicans will continue to listen to the American people and their call for commonsense health care reform and for shrinking the massive spending and debt that are accumulating. That’s why I voted to create a bipartisan commission to focus on the real problem – spending – something your editorial overlooked. And that’s also why Republicans continue to push for step-by-step reforms to health care that get at the underlying problem of rising costs.
Next, you take issue with me for criticizing the administration’s tendency to treat aspects of the war on al-Qaida and other extremist groups as a law-enforcement matter, and conflate this shortcoming with America’s success in Afghanistan. I support Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy for prevailing in Afghanistan. But I can’t agree with you that the administration made the right decision by putting the attorney general in charge of large portions of the war on terror.
Take, for example, the administration’s handling of the Christmas Day bomber, a foreign-born terrorist who attempted to kill nearly 300 innocent civilians in a commercial airliner over Detroit. Instead of treating him as the source of valuable intelligence that he is, the administration read him his Miranda rights and gave him a lawyer after just a 50-minute interview.
Nor can I support the decision to try terrorists responsible for killing thousands of Americans in the same civilian courts where we try bank robbers and other common criminals. Putting 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his terrorist associates on trial in New York provides these murderers with the very propaganda platform they crave. Liberals and conservatives alike agree that this would pose a needless risk to America’s security. Foreign national terrorists, whether they are captured in the United States or overseas, ought to be sent to Guantánamo, detained there, interrogated there, and have their cases adjudicated there.
The administration recently signaled that it is reconsidering the decision to send the most notorious foreign national terrorists to a New York courtroom, and that’s good news. The previous administration already made the mistake of trying foreign terrorists in civilian courtrooms, a mistake that Congress demonstrated it had learned from when it passed the Military Commissions Act in 2006. It’s curious to me, in this connection, that the only two Bush Administration policies the current administration ever cites approvingly is the previous administration’s decision to try certain terrorists in civilian courts and its decision to release detainees from Guantánamo. After seeing the disastrous results of the former, I and many others realized our policy had to change. As for Guantánamo, I consistently opposed the previous administration’s efforts to close it. Guantánamo is the right place for detaining, interrogating, and trying terrorists. Period.
The administration’s newfound openness to moving the proposed New York City terror trials elsewhere suggests that, on this issue, it has started listening to the American people, who don’t want to see their tax dollars go to defense lawyers for terrorists. It also suggests that just because the previous administration made mistakes when it came to trying terrorists in civilian courts, or moving detainees from Guantánamo, doesn’t mean we need to make the same mistakes again, as this paper’s editorial page seems to suggest.
MITCH McCONNELL
U.S. Senate