Leaders in Congress and the U.S. attorney general say President Obama simply doesn't have legal authority to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility through executive action, but that fact didn't stop a supremely confident president last week from threatening to act on his own if lawmakers won't cooperate.
At a year-end press conference on Friday -- the same day Mr. Obama signed a massive spending bill that seems to prohibit him from closing Guantanamo on his own -- the president said he will explore the limits of his executive power if the House and Senate don't pass legislation to shutter the prison.
The statement underscores Mr. Obama's belief that he clearly holds the upper hand over Congress after securing significant political wins over the past 12 months, including last week's spending package that includes funding for many of the president's top priorities, such as fighting climate change.
The president also has pointed to a recent U.N. deal on global warming, the diplomatic reset with Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal and other recent successes.
Those and other victories have given Mr. Obama the confidence to test Congress' hand on Guantanamo and threaten executive action as a bargaining chip, even though it appears clear he cannot legally close the facility on his own, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who has written on presidential leadership and executive power.
"I thought that was pretty remarkable," Mr. Rottinghaus said of the president's Guantanamo stance. "One of the things [presidents] often do is they use their first-mover advantage to try to get a better deal from Congress than they could otherwise get on their own...
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