Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure

Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.

I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.

I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.

Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.

If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.

It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.

Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.

Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.

Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.

That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.

There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.

To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)

This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.

The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.

I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)

I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.