Pivoting off Lindsey Graham’s abandonment of his own climate bill, Ezra Klein makes a broader observation: It’s further evidence that the “lone Republican” strategy doesn’t work. Time and again, Democrats have ended up in a room with a single Republican who seemed willing to cut a deal. It was Olympia Snowe on health care, Bob [...]

Hustler’s gambit: when the mark starts paying, raise his interest rate. And Lindsey Graham is hustling. According to the Post, now he wants a “grand bargain” over terrorism detentions — which is to say, allowing them fewer procedural and substantive rights to contest their detentions and plead their cases — with the White House in [...]

If the Wall Street Journal has it right, the Grahamanuel deal to swap a Khalid Shaikh Mohammed military commission for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is inching forward in the Senate. Well, sort of. The paper claims that anonymous Democratic Senate aides “say Mr. Graham believes two other Republicans are willing to [...]

Ezra Klein has some fun with Lindsey Graham’s health-care-dare. (“‘If they jam through health care,’ said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then Democrats will have ‘poisoned the well’ on other issues…’”) The thing about Graham is this: other GOPers can pull the trigger on Permanent Obstructionism, but he can’t. He’s the guy who wants [...]

The last hour of my life, compressed: Glenn Beck hosted Eric Massa. Rahm Emanuel won. (Thanks to Benjy Sarlin for the video reference.)

I suppose I should let the man who wrote the book on this write the post, but Peter Baker’s profile of Rahm Emanuel contains this judicious account of Emanuel’s views on foreign policy and national security: Massachusetts and health care have reinforced a broader liberal indictment of Emanuel. He has been leery of or has [...]

I have to highlight this Washington Independent post, because it provides the legislative language favored by the people Lindsey Graham is telling the White House he can bring along in a detentions deal: An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner [...]

This is the deal Lindsey Graham thinks he can use to get the White House to abandon a civilian trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Republican support for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. According to the more sophisticated explanation/rationalization I’ve heard for accepting the deal, it’s not so much that Graham can really bring along Republicans [...]

I don’t want to step on the toes of a forthcoming piece, so I hope you’ll forgive me being a bit cryptic. But one of the basic principles animating the Obama administration, as I understand it, is a very civic-minded impulse to resolve the complex interplay of terrorism and justice. In other words, when he [...]

So here’s where Lindsey Graham shows Rahm Emanuel that he represents some value-added on detainee issues to the Obama administration. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bill today — the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010 — that authorizes indefinite detention without charge for terrorism detainees. (Or, as McCain put it, [...]