While funding is the most immediate obstacle, it’s actually deep-rooted suspicion, fear and disappointment from both sides of the aisle that have derailed the president’s plans.

Charlie Savage today reports on the logistical obstacles to shifting Gitmo detainees to the Thomson Correctional Center: the 8 to 10 months it will take to install new perimeter fencing, security towers and cameras, and the problem of how the administration can come up with the $150 million needed to purchase the facility, in light of the legislative obstacles to appropriating money for it anytime in the next year.

But political obstacles underlie the logistics, and they’re coming not just from Republicans like Rep. John Boehner, who last week vowed not to support any appropriations for facilities housing Gitmo prisoners to the United States. Opposition is also coming from Democrats like Ike Skelton of Missouri, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Loretta Sanchez of California and Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.

The Obama administration should not be surprised. After all, as my colleague Spencer Ackerman points out, if it were just bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States for trial, it wouldn’t have this problem. But once the president announced that the Thomson facility might also be used to continue to hold terror suspects indefinitely without charge or trial, what’s the Democrats’ incentive for supporting it? Isn’t that just moving the liability of Guantanamo, which the administration and its supporters have long said acts as a recruiting tool for terrorists, to U.S. soil? It’s hard to see why any lawmakers from either party want to move that much-hated site to the continental United States, where their constituents already fear another terrorist attack.

As Sanchez said to Savage: “Particularly making something on U.S. soil an attraction for Al Qaeda and terrorists to go after — inciting them to attack something on U.S. soil — that’s a problem, and we need to think it through.”

Sure, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and some other Illinois lawmakers support the move in large part because it would create jobs for some of their constituents. But while a nice plus for them, that’s not exactly the best argument for a major change in national security policy.

Once again, the Obama administration has managed to alienate both parties rather than unite them behind a common cause. Let’s hope the new year brings a new strategy.

In the meantime, Boehner and his colleagues are likely to win the day. As he put it at a press conference last Thursday: “There are at least two pieces of legislation that are going to have to go through this Congress before those prisoners can come here. And I wouldn’t want to bet on when those two pieces of legislation will pass, if ever.”

But there’s much more, as Marcy Wheeler hones in on. Check out this letter from George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, shortly after the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by extremists in Pakistan. Tenet tells the group that Pearl was not a CIA asset or operative. But then he declines to issue a firm denial that the agency is not having its assets or operatives pose as journalists. “A blanket statement that we would never use journalistic cover would, I know, be preferable to the members of ASNE,” Tenet writes. “The kinds of people who kidnap and murder reporters like Daniel Pearl, however, are unlikely to believe a policy statement by the U.S. government no matter how firmly it is made.”

So Tenet hides behind Omar Saeed Shaikh, Pearl’s most likely murderer. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession to killing Pearl is rather dubious.) As someone who occasionally reports from war zones, I don’t appreciate the non-denial denial of something that could endanger my life. It’s one thing to say that fanatics won’t believe the denial. It’s quite another not to issue it for that — alleged — reason.

But are the statements signed by Obama really the same as those signed by Bush?

Not surprisingly, longtime Democratic administration lawyers don’t think so. Walter Dellinger, for example, who promoted the use of signing statements in the Clinton administration, says the difference is that Obama’s signing statements are based on sound interpretations of constitutional law.

Signing statements “long have been used to signal the President’s belief that some aspect of a piece of legislation is unconstitutional,” Dellinger wrote in a 2006 response to the ABA, along with former Clinton officials David Barron and Martin Lederman, both now in the Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel. The problem with Bush’s signing statements were not that they expressed constitutional reservations about laws passed by Congress, but that they reflected “the unjustifiable arrogation of power” that Bush asserted in office.

Given the officials that populated the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush years, it’s not surprising that his signing statements may have crossed the line from legitimate reservations to unauthorized power grabs. Obama, who so far hasn’t argued for a “Unitary Executive” or other theories of far-reaching executive power, seems to be issuing statements that at least on their face comport with generally accepted understandings of the law.

Still, his first signing statement, limiting executive officials’ communications to Congress, illustrates the potential problem. In signing the bill, which prohibits executive officials from preventing or punishing government employees’ communications to Congress, Obama added: “I do not interpret this provision to detract from my authority to direct the heads of executive departments to supervise, control, and correct employees’ communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential.”

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University called that “a strike against transparency.” Noting that the law was written to protect government employees who blow the whistle on government misconduct, “allowing the heads of executive branch to ‘control’ the employees’ communications defeats the very purpose of the communications,” and thwarts Congress’ ability to exercise effective oversight. Moreover, notes the Brennan Center, the signing statement could have a chilling effect against potential whistleblowers, leaving them open to retaliation whenever the agency decides that the information revealed was “confidential.”

So Obama’s signing statements might not be unlawful, but at least some of them are politically questionable. Then again, they’re not really all that surprising. As Andrew Cohen of CBS News put it back in March when Obama issued his first of many such statements: “If you were hoping that the Obama team would come into the White House and aggressively undercut its own power it’s time to change dreams.”

According to Savage, Sotomayor “expressed skepticism” in that lecture “about the expanding government surveillance power in the USA Patriot Act.”  He quotes Sotomayor saying “Whether and how these statutes will be challenged in court is difficult to discern, but suffice it to say that traditional Fourth Amendment law does not permit searches and seizures without particularized suspicions of illegality.”

These remarks “represent the most detailed indication to surface so far of her approach to executive power and counterterrorism,” Savage writes.

Savage has been an astute reporter on these issues, and not surprisingly, his observation here was presented in the relevant context of the lecture that she was giving. (That’s not true of the Fox News report, as I mentioned earlier.)

I’ll have more on Sotomayor’s views on executive power — and a key case she ruled on that the media has largely overlooked — later today.

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