President Obama became the first Democratic President in history today to have an arms-control treaty ratified on his watch. The New START Treaty was approved in the Senate by a vote of 71-26. Thirteen Republicans, a quarter of the Republican caucus, broke with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). This is the first time an arms control treaty has ever passed without the support of the minority leader. As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said yesterday, “In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95.”

A year ago, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his vision of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons. The ratification of the START treaty is a small but important step toward this goal. It ensures that nuclear stability is maintained and lays the groundwork for future negotiations with Russia, paving the way for deeper cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While the START treaty has been called a modest treaty, the implications of its failure would have been anything but and would have caused dangerous upheaval in the post-Cold War nuclear order.

Republican opposition looked increasingly petty toward the end of the START debate, with most complaints relating to Senate process. Leslie Gelb, president-emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that opposition to New START “seriously damages [Republican] credibility on national security.”

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Managing Director of the National Security and International Policy Program at the Center for American Progress.

The Obama administration’s forthcoming executive order on detention will establish a meaningful review process for Guantanamo detainees held in law of war detention. This type of detention has been endorsed by the Supreme Court and has been consistently upheld by lower courts in the ongoing habeas corpus cases. More importantly, this move will allow the Obama administration to regain some of the initiative on detention policy that has been dominated by Congress for much of the last 18 months.

Legal authority for the detention of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan comes from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on September 18, 2001. The Supreme Court endorsed this detention authority in 2004 in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, and lower courts have further refined this authority in the numerous habeas proceedings brought by Guantanamo detainees. It is incorrect to claim that this type of detention is unlawful or unconstitutional.

The Obama administration’s extensive review of the cases of Guantanamo detainees it inherited from its predecessor determined that 48 detainees would be held in this type of law of war detention. This Executive Order is a significant improvement on the process, such as it was, created by the Bush administration and in fact goes well beyond what is required by the Geneva Conventions.

Detainees will be represented by attorneys, the review will be conducted by a broad group of agencies — not just the military, and the review board will be separated from those who made previous decisions on that detainee’s detention. This is a real adversarial process that the American people can have confidence will come to the best possible determination about the necessity of each individual detainee’s continued detention.

Make no mistake: Guantanamo is a stain on America, one that seriously weakens our overall counterterrorism strategy. America’s military and intelligence agencies all conclude that Guantanamo provides our terrorist enemies significant propaganda victories and boosts their recruitment, creating more terrorists than it has ever detained. Closing it is a national security imperative and the Obama administration is absolutely correct to continue its push to do that.

Unfortunately, many in Congress have chosen the politics of fear, and tried to tie President Obama’s hands and prevent the closure of Guantanamo. Up to this point, the administration had not found a way to effectively push back. The most important aspect of this Executive Order is that it can be the start of that effort. It will only get more difficult in the next Congress and the Obama administration needs to take back some of the initiative on detention policy, or it risks being forced to return to the disastrous detention policies of the Bush administration.

The process for law of war detention contained in the new executive order is confined to the legacy cases at Guantanamo the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor. It is a genuine effort to establish a workable system out of the chaos of the Bush era that protects both the security of the American people and the rights of those detained at Guantanamo, all in an incredibly hostile political environment. This move should provide the Obama administration the platform from which to hold its ground against a new Congress that appears determined to use U.S. counterterrorism policy for political gain.

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released a new congressional apportionment map which gives more Congressional seats to the South and the West at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest. One of the states that will lose a congressional seat is Louisiana.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) released a statement yesterday expressing his outrage. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants are to blame for Louisiana’s loss of a congressional seat:

“Even though we’ve been expecting this, the confirmation that Louisiana will lose a congressional seat is frustrating. Last year, I tried to prevent this from happening with my amendment to require a citizenship question on the census and to prevent the counting of illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment,” said Vitter.

“Now, Louisiana stands to lose clout in Congress, while states that welcome illegal immigrants stand to unfairly benefit from artificially inflated population totals.”

As Vitter notes, last year, he and Robert Bennett (R-UT) attempted to add an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill that would require the U.S. Census Bureau to add a question about immigration status to its 2010 survey. According to Vitter, undocumented immigrants should be specifically identified and cut out of congressional reapportionment decisions because they “dilute” the voting power of the rest of the population.

The Fourteenth Amendment clearly stipulates that representation should be determined by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.” Asking a citizenship question would’ve likely dissuaded undocumented immigrants from participating in the Census in the first place. Widespread non-participation would have lead to inaccurate demographic information and costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and health care planning. That’s why children, ex-felons, legal residents, and several other nonvoters are also included in the census apportionment data.

For those reasons, Vitter’s proposal fell flat on its face. The census questionnaire didn’t include a single question on immigration status. So, it’s odd that Vitter is now complaining that “states that welcome illegal immigrants” are going to benefit at Louisiana’s expense when he doesn’t even have any census data to base that on.

What the new census data does show is that the Latino population is rapidly expanding across the country and will nearly triple to about 130 million by mid-century. Of course, not all Latinos are immigrants and they’re certainly not all undocumented. Yet if Vitter’s race-baiting campaign ads are any indication, the senator of Louisiana has a hard time distinguishing between the two.

Vitter has also failed to acknowledge that migrants — many of them undocumented — have given Louisiana a much-needed population boost and helped rebuild its infrastructure following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Demographers point to the state’s sluggish growth over the past decade that put it “on track to lose a seat in the House of Representatives and one of its nine electoral votes anyway.”

The ratification of the New START treaty is a huge victory for President Obama and huge blow to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and the Republican Senate leadership. START also confirms what progressives have been saying on other issues — namely, that when the White House stands and fights and refuses to give ground it can win.

The treaty fight turned into a game of chicken in the last six weeks in which Kyl was determined to delay, and Democrats were determined to hold a vote. The question was always who would swerve. Kyl seemed supremely confident that the White House would lose its nerve, but it didn’t and pressed on. What makes this an even more humiliating defeat for Kyl is that he didn’t swerve — he, with Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and at the end Lindsey Graham (R-SC), pressed for delay up until the very end — instead he drove head on. But in the collision, we discovered he was driving a smart car and START supporters were driving a tank. He just got run over and embarrassingly for him, before the impact, many of his colleagues jumped out of the car.

That turned this into a stinging defeat for Senators Jon Kyl and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (as well as the Heritage foundation). They were thoroughly repudiated by more than a quarter of the Republican caucus — a shocking display of disunity after two years of almost uniform obstruction. It was indeed an epic collapse and in the end made the Senate leadership incredibly irrelevant.

Kyl was driven by radicalism not just politics. Fred Kaplan and Adam Serwer have penned excellent analyses where they argue that choosing to fight over a modest treaty was a huge mistake for Senate Republicans, since by doing so made it a much bigger victory than it would have been if they just all supported the treaty. That is no doubt correct from a political perspective. But it misses the fact that Senator Kyl and many Senate Republicans actually have extremely radical views on nuclear weapons policy.

While Kyl called the START treaty “benign” in the summer, he has doggedly pursued nuclear weapons modernization. And while he got increased funding commitments the issue that he fought hard for over the last decade was the building of an entirely new nuclear warhead, which was defeated by past Democratic congresses. If START had been delayed into the new year, it is clear that Kyl’s cost for supporting the treaty would have gone up significantly and likely would have been the Reliable Replacement Warhead that Kyl so fervently craved. So in the end it was a bad political move by Kyl to oppose the treaty, but he was driven by a far right nuclear radicalism, not just a desire to defeat the President.

The White House and John Kerry threw down and caused political pain for Republicans. Over the past year, the White House and Senator John Kerry desperately tried to enlist the support of Senator Kyl. They made a massive preemptive concession by budgeting $80 billion to the nuclear weapons complex and they bent over backwards to get him on board – even flying people out to Arizona to meet with him. Kerry also did everything he could to head of process complaints. He held a huge number of hearings – with more Republican witnesses than Democrats. He delayed the committee vote until after the August recess in response to Republican demands. I worried at the time that this would just make it easier for Kyl to delay further.

But after Senator Kyl blindsided the White House and Kerry in November and said he would oppose a vote this year, they went on the offensive. Many expected the administration to relent and allow the treaty to be delayed until next year where its likelihood of passage would narrow significantly. Indeed, many reporters were already writing START’s obituary following Kyl’s statement. But the White House came out swinging and drew the line in the sand, saying no matter what a vote was going to happen this year. Case in point was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ statement last week eviscerating Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for demanding to read the entire treaty. DeMint quickly caved.

In other words, the Administration refused to back down and used the bully pulpit to make the case for the treaty. It hosted Colin Powell and demonstrated a show of force by bringing Henry Kissinger and others to the White House. This put Republicans on the defensive and led to a public backlash. More than 50 newspaper editorial boards came out to support the treaty eviscerating Kyl for putting politics ahead of national security. Senate Democrats took to the airwaves to attack Kyl and Republicans were seen as being irresponsible on national security. This heat on Republicans was critical to the collapse of opposition to the treaty.

Finally, this victory shows progressives can fight and win on national security issues and on nuclear policy. Republicans made all the standard arguments on missile defense, not trusting Russia, and on disarmament, but still lost. Granted progressives had the high ground when fighting on START, but progressives did not run when facing Republican attacks.

It is hard for many observers and activists to realize this, but there is no longer a post-Vietnam hang over for Democrats on foreign policy. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that Republicans have a post-Iraq credibility problem. The START victory shows that Democrats have nothing to lose politically, and in fact have much to gain, when debating and fighting with Republicans on foreign policy.