Detainee Bill Boosts the GOP

Three months ago, the Supreme Court handed President Bush what appeared to be a stinging defeat, ruling that he had overstepped the bounds of his power by holding and trying terrorism suspects without clear authority from Congress. Two weeks ago, Bush’s hopes of settling the issue with new legislation ran into serious trouble when powerful Republican senators rebelled against him.

But this week, the president brushed aside those setbacks and won what appeared to be a significant political victory largely on his terms, securing passage of tough rules that allow the government to hold, interrogate and try “enemy combatants” while granting them legal rights that are limited.

The complex bill, which swept through the House and Senate after backroom negotiations, not only gave Bush most of what he wanted in substance, it also provided Republicans with a rhetorical club to use against Democrats on terrorism.

The renewed focus on the issue that has most benefited the GOP since Sept. 11, 2001, has provided a much-needed lift for Republicans as they move into the final weeks of the hotly contested campaign for control of Congress.

“At least for the moment,” said political scientist Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University, “it has deprived the Democrats of the momentum that they enjoyed as recently as six weeks ago.”

The opportunity was not lost on GOP leaders, who wasted no time in using it.

“Do [voters] want to be voting for a party that does unabashedly say, ‘We’re going to have victory in this war on terror,’ or a party that says, ‘We’ve got to surrender’?” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Friday.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said in a television interview that Democrats “are so bent on protecting criminals ... they’re not allowing us to prosecute these people.”

“The 130 most treacherous people probably in the world, and they want to put them and release them out in the public eventually,” Hastert said.

No Democrat in Congress has called for releasing the detainees considered most dangerous at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or proposed that the United States surrender to terrorists.

As the dust settled after a week of heated debate and rapid-fire votes, some Democrats privately acknowledged Bush’s clear victory.

What Democratic leaders most wanted was to change the subject from terrorism to Iraq, on which the president has been much less successful.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) held a news conference Friday to argue that recently released excerpts of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, as well as a new book by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, offered new evidence that the president had mismanaged the war in Iraq.

Legal experts said the tribunal law was certain to be challenged, beginning with a controversial provision that blocks foreign prisoners held by the military from appealing their detention in federal courts. But they also noted that no challenge would reach the Supreme Court before the Nov. 7 election.

“It is an appallingly bad bill. I think it is a stain on our national reputation and a national disgrace,” said Harold Koh, a former Clinton administration official who is now dean of Yale Law School.

“By going on the offensive to turn this into a test of members’ commitment to the war on terror, Bush bullied them into taking a bad bill with virtually no legislative process. Where were the hearings? Where were the expert witnesses?”

A conservative legal scholar, Douglas W. Kmiec of Pepperdine Law School, disagreed with Koh’s assessment.

But he agreed that the bill had turned into a political football.

“I think this is a reasonable effort to respond to the concerns raised by the Supreme Court,” said Kmiec, a former Reagan administration official. “I think it will be challenged; I think it should on its face survive challenge.... It is more protective and solicitous [of detainees’ rights] than anything I can recall out of the Civil War, World War I or World War II.”

Still, he added, “there’s an awful lot of politics surrounding this matter at the moment, and both sides are playing the game.

“The president is insisting that Democrats who don’t support him are weak in the defense of the nation, and Democrats in turn are suggesting that the president doesn’t care about the Constitution.”

Reflecting the power of the terrorism issue at the polls -- or at least candidates’ perception of its power -- almost every Democratic lawmaker in a potentially tight Senate race voted with the Republican majority to approve the bill: Sens. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and, in the House, Senate candidates Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Harold E. Ford Jr. of Tennessee.

On the flip side, Sen. Lincoln Chafee, facing a tough reelection battle in largely Democratic Rhode Island, was the sole Republican senator to vote no.

Though Menendez and Stabenow voted for the bill, a Republican group attacked them for earlier supporting an amendment by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) that would have given terrorism suspects the right to challenge their detention in federal court.

Menendez and Stabenow “sided with trial lawyers and terrorists,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee charged, linking them to two of the GOP’s favorite targets.

“We hit every Democrat in a competitive seat on this issue,” said Brian Nick, a spokesman for the GOP committee.

The bill, said Rutgers’ Baker, “is one more blunt instrument that the president can use on the Democrats to say what he’s been saying all along ... which is to charge that the Democrats are soft on terrorism.”

“It’s hard to know what issue is going to be the most powerful [in November].... But the pushback on terrorism has been extremely well-orchestrated,” Baker said.

“The Republicans have stayed on message with incredible discipline.”

Democratic consultant Jeremy Rosner argued that the charge of “soft on terrorism” might be less effective this year than it was four years ago. Republicans then gained seats in both chambers of Congress.

“I think it’s too early to tell how this will all play for sure,” he said.

The renewed attention to terrorism after the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks “did lift Bush’s personal approval in the polls, but it didn’t move approval of Congress,” Rosner said.

Congressional analyst Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said the outcome of November’s election would still depend largely on what issue dominates voters’ thinking five weeks from now.

“To the extent that the spotlight moves toward terrorism [and] national security ... that’s a good thing for President Bush, it’s a good thing for his party,” Cook said.

“If it moves back over toward Iraq, then that’s bad for President Bush, it’s bad for the Republican Party, and they lose the House for sure.

“The more likely outcome, I think, is what if that spotlight shifts about halfway over, so it’s partially terrorism, national security, falling gas prices and partially on the war in Iraq,” he said. “That’s where this thing becomes a real, real, real close call, and the House could go either way.”

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this report.