On the issue of indefinite detention Senator Sherrod Brown has played the people of Ohio for chumps. The question is whether the people of Ohio will roll over like trained dogs and ask for more of the same.
Sherrod Brown: Voting for Indefinite Detention Without Due Process in 2006
When Sherrod Brown was a U.S. Representative running for Senate, he voted for H.R. 6166, a bill to scuttle habeus corpus rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution, install undemocratic executive committees without review to designate citizens and noncitizens alike as “enemy combatants, and detain non-citizens indefinitely without standards for proof. You could say that H.R. 6166 was the big lead-up to S. 1867, the bill Sherrod Brown helped pass in 2011.
The Apology and The Promise, 2007
Next came the damage control. After the campaign was over and Sherrod Brown won office to the Senate, he went on The Young Turks show to apologize for his “mistake.” He promised to fix that mistake:
Cenk Uygur: Thanks for joining us Senator. We appreciate it. I gotta start off with the question we’ve had now for over six months, I gotta ask you, why did you vote for the Military Commissions Act?
Sherrod Brown: It was a bad vote. I shouldn’t have.
Cenk Uygur: Oh, wow. Okay.
Sherrod Brown: A vote I’ll correct … when it comes.
Cenk Uygur: So, you regret that?
Sherrod Brown: I take responsibility. It was the heat of the campaign and I made a mistake.
Cenk Uygur: So, if it comes again you’re going to change the vote?
Sherrod Brown: You bet.
How well has Sherrod Brown kept his promise?
Sherrod Brown: Voting Against Fair Trials in 2009
In 2009, Sherrod Brown voted in favor of S.Amdt. 1133 to H.R. 2346, which would have forbidden the President from giving a fair trial to anyone in indefinite detention at the Guantanamo gulag. Sherrod Brown made that vote despite the revelation that many Guantanamo detainees actually were not terrorists after all.
When Sherrod Brown made this vote, he broke his promise.
Sherrod Brown: Voting to Expand Indefinite Detention Powers in 2011
In 2011, On December 16 Sherrod Brown voted to give U.S. government agents the power to toss people into prison forever. Doesn’t matter whether they’re arrested on U.S. soil or not. Doesn’t matter if they’re citizens or not. No charges filed. No proof in court. No trials. No due process as described in the Constitution. All government agents have to do is say that people are terrorists, and it can throw away the key on these people, forever. As we know, people are falsely accused of being terrorists on a regular basis. Remove due process for them and you have an unleashed state. Ignore constitutional guarantees of the rights of individual people and none of us is safe.
When Sherrod Brown made this vote, he broke his promise.
Sherrod Brown: Sitting on His Hands Regarding Indefinite Detention in 2012
In 2012, Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has introduced S. 2175. This bill, also called the Due Process and Military Detention Amendments Act, requires that if a person is arrested in the United States, they must be granted a “trial and proceedings by a court established under Article III of the Constitution of the United States or by an appropriate State court. Such trial and proceedings shall have all the due process as provided for under the Constitution of the United States.”
This bill would undo some of the damage wreaked by Sherrod Brown’s vote last December, and his vote for the Military Commissions Act before that. But Senator Sherrod Brown has failed to cosponsor S. 2175.
By this inaction, Sherrod Brown is breaking his promise.
People of Ohio, Sherrod Brown has lied to you. He’s repeatedly broken this promise, on a subject that straddles the dividing line between liberty and tyranny. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to take this lying down? Are you going to be the chumps that Sherrod Brown clearly thinks you are?
Come November, we’ll find out.
