The President signed the defense authorization bill today, appending a signing statement expressing concerns with the detainee measures in the bill.

A unique pressure campaign has been playing out in Iowa, where the group Occupy Des Moines and other progressive groups briefly took over both the Obama for America and the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters, just as the media spotlight descends on the city two weeks before the caucuses.

After its FBI Director told Congress that the revisions to the defense authorization bill did not satisfy his concerns with the bill, the White House issued a statement of Administration policy saying that they would not veto the bill, despite an earlier threat.

Two major year-end pieces of legislation were readied yesterday, and in this case, House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on the measures, expecting to pass them by the end of the week. First, appropriators agreed to a $1 trillion omnibus spending bill covering the rest of the fiscal year (to September 30 of next year) on domestic spending. They also agreed on the defense spending bill, which still allows indefinite detention of suspects.

Congress has apparently decided that it can only deal with one major fight at a time. At the same time that the parties jockey over whether to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, at the end of this week the current continuing resolution to fund the government expires. So, some progress has apparently been made on an agreement that would fund the government through the fiscal year.

The Obama Administration may still veto the bill, since this punting to the Supreme Court on this one aspect does not address their point, which isn’t really opposition to indefinite detention as much as it is opposition to having Congress dictate detention policy at all. They already operate under the premise that the US can indefinitely detain terrorist suspects, and they want that power maintained in the executive branch rather than codified into law.

Mark Udall’s amendment to strip out indefinite detention provisions from the defense authorization bill failed today, and the bill will likely pass the Senate with the provisions intact. This sets up a possible, but not certain, Obama veto.

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

Even in the Era of New Dysfunction, Congress usually manages to pass a defense authorization bill. The forces of nature demand that the war machine gets to set its budgets on time, even if the budgets for food stamps, welfare, the NIH, the Department of Education, etc., have to sit on pins and needles and [...]

This was the first vote on the Afghan war since the killing of Osama bin Laden. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave it a huge boost by announcing she would vote for it this morning, in defiance of the Obama Administration’s strategy.