By CQ Staff

President Obama may have to readjust his deadline to close the Guantánamo military prison since both Democratic and Republican lawmakers oppose bringing any detainees to the United States.

“I think we ought to leave Guantánamo open,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky. “It’s a $200 million state-of-the-art facility. No one has ever escaped from there. It has courtrooms for the military commissions trials which the president has now correctly, in my view, decided ... maybe that’s a good way to try some of these terrorists after all.

“It’s the perfect place for them,” McConnell said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There’s no reason in the world to bring these people to the United States. I don’t think there’s a community in America that’s going to be interested in taking them.”

Obama announced his intentions but opposition has surfaced to the plan. The president said last week that military trials would hear charges against those accused of assisting in the Sept. 11 attacks and other acts of terrorism.

Under the plan, most of the prisoners will be released, sent to other countries, tried in civilian courts in the United States or held indefinitely as prisoners of war. Obama said the detainees would have stronger legal protections than were offered under the Bush administration’s military commissions.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved on May 14 its draft version of the second fiscal 2009 supplemental bill, which differs from the House version on the prison closure. Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., said he still expects the full Senate to pass the measure before the Memorial Day recess.

The Senate version proposes $80 million for the effort to close the prisons at Guantánamo and transfer the detainees off the base. But the bill would condition those funds on the release of an administration plan for detainee relocation — and it would permit prisoners to be moved only to other countries.

The version that the full House passed on May 14 (HR 2346) contains no Guantánamo-related funding. It has more extensive policy language that would require the administration to certify to state governments that detainees do not pose a security risk before they could be transferred to U.S. soil.

Sen. Jim Webb , D-Va., who supported Obama’s decision to close the facility, said he believes “Guantánamo has become the great Rorschach test of how we feel about international terrorism.”

“... We should close down Guántanamo at the right time,” Webb said on ABC’s ‘This Week.’ “Let’s process them the right rules of law, the right due process, within the constraints of how we have to handle these cases, with military intelligence and that sort of thing, but the facility is there at Guantánamo to do it. And then close it down.”

In an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. Peter King of New York, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security committee, said he believed Obama would continue to keep Guantánamo open “until he can find out where they should go.”

“President [George W.] Bush wanted to close it,” said King. “President Obama wants it closed, but he made a mistake by setting an arbitrary deadline. ... So, more and more, we’re finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong. And I think President Obama is making the right decisions. And he made a mistake about Guantánamo. I expect to see that reversed by next January.”

McConnell supported King’s position. “The president made a mistake by picking a date certain to close Guantánamo,” he said. “He’s changed his mind about a number of things. This is one, I think, that requires an adjustment in his position because I think he’s going to have a very difficult time figuring out what to do with these terrorists.”