President Obama's First Hundred Days

Finally for tonight, a lot of people are debating what priorities President Obama should have right off the bat in his Administration, and while I know that he will have access to information I don't have (and thus make some decisions that I might personally not understand), there are two mainstays of his campaign appearances that will be an important measurement for me as to whether President Obama will be the man he promised to be, or just another lying politician.

First, there are Executive Orders and Signing Statements. Having seen him speak several times, I can tell you that candidate Obama promised regularly during the campaign that one of the first things he'd do in office was direct his Attorney General to go through all of the Executive Orders and the controversial Signing Statements of the Bush administration with an eye towards identifying those which de facto (if not outright de jure) violate Constitutional principles. He has promised that as they are identified, he will move swiftly to counter them with Executive Orders of his own.

Now, you may not be as bothered as I am by the orders and statements that the Bush Administration has issued, but that was definitely a major supporting piece of the "change" message Candidate Obama ran on, and I will be interested in watching whether President Obama delivers.

The second thing I'm looking for out of President Obama is an immediate return to the days when the Geneva Convention was an honored piece of human rights legislation that we followed and expected others to follow as well, rather than a thorny inconvenience to be ignored or outright derided.

How will this manifest? I don't know. It will show up in how we handle Guantanamo Bay going forward. It will show up in how the trials of those in that prison are handled. It will show up in whether we try to continue the legal fiction that by creating a new label, "enemy combatant", we can then claim that people in that category are not due any of the rights they would previously have been under any of the existing labels.

I don't know exactly how any of these things will change. Guantanamo Bay and the greater war on terrorism are sticky situations, we need to take extra careful steps in trying to resolve them.

Still, I am watching to see how these change.

Liam.