The Imperial Vice Presidency
New details about his secret mission to expand the power of the president show that Cheney, at the end of his career, refuses to loosen his grip.
When Huey P. Long left the governorship of Louisiana in 1932 to become a U.S. senator, he filled the position with a childhood friend named Oscar Kelly Allen, known as O.K., who gave the OK to whatever the Kingfish wished. The story is still told, perhaps apocryphal, that one day a leaf wafted through an open window and landed on O.K.’s desk and, without hesitation, he signed it.
Two months after 9/11, on the day of the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 13, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared in the Oval Office with a four-page executive order designating terrorism suspects as enemy combatants to be held indefinitely, with no right to have their detention reviewed by any court except newly created military commissions, where they would not be permitted to learn the accusations or evidence against them, or be represented by counsel, or even know that their case had been heard and decided.
The secretary of state and the national security advisor were deliberately kept uninformed as the White House staff secretary prepared the order for signature. According to a four-part series published this week in the Washington Post on the extraordinary power of the vice president, “When it [the order] returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.” Colin Powell was stunned when he learned of the fait accompli. “What the hell just happened?” he asked. Condoleezza Rice was described as “incensed.” But neither of them, then or later, effectively challenged Cheney’s usurpation of executive authority. And, as can be gathered inferentially, Bush never bothered to ask Cheney about their opinions on the executive order or to call them; nor did he seem to care.
The Washington Post series, written by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, is an acknowledgment, after more than six years, of the hardly secret scope of Cheney’s unprecedented influence. The articles provide fresh detail of his elaborate network within the federal government and how he pulls its strings. On principle, Cheney and his aides are hostile to regular lines of authority set up to enforce professional standards and a responsible chain of command. Having served as President Ford’s chief of staff, he understood intimately how control of the paper flow meant control of the decision making. In 1999, the Post reported, Cheney explained to a conference of presidential historians: “The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical.”
Cheney has crushed the normal interagency process that permitted communication, cross-fertilization and cooperation at the sub-Cabinet level through all previous modern administrations. At the same time, he has isolated Cabinet secretaries, causing them to be fired when they contradicted him, as he did with Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill.
Cheney thrives in darkness, operating by stealth within the government, and makes a cult of secrecy. None of these insights are new, except for additional telling details. Reports the Post: “Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped ‘Treated As: Top Secret/SCI.’”
The Post series appeared just as Cheney refused to provide his office’s documents to the National Archives and Records Administration as provided by law. He then attempted to abolish the specific agency within the Archives to punish it for its impudence. Cheney’s chief of staff and former counsel, David Addington, floated the novel doctrine that the vice president is not “an entity within the executive branch.” He claimed that the Archives had no authority and that therefore it “is not necessary in these circumstances to address the subject of any alternative reasoning.” Only when Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., proposed cutting off the vice president’s $4.8 million in executive-branch funding did Cheney concede.
Despite the absurdity of Addington’s argument, Cheney has a point, though not a constitutional one. He has transformed an office that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, said was “not worth a bucket of warm piss” into one of vast power. Cheney has acted as the Stalin of the Bush administration, the master of the bureaucracy, eliminating one rival after another, ruthlessly and unscrupulously concentrating power, the culmination of a more than 30-year career. The Post articles are based on information provided by dissidents who have suffered at Cheney’s hand and have given Post reporters stories proving that Cheney’s whole point is power.
Rather than transcending the executive, Cheney has deranged it in his effort to remake it into a branch of government of unlimited, unaccountable power. The head of the search committee who chose himself to be the experienced vice president to a callow president saw in George W. Bush his opportunity radically to alter the place of the executive within the federal government, which he had been straining to do since he served as Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant in the Nixon White House. Cheney has viewed recent American history as a struggle between the imperial presidency necessary in a brutish world and the naive, undependable and in some cases disloyal constraints of Congress, the press and the judiciary. Under Bush, Cheney has shaped the presidential prerogative, acting as “an entity within the executive branch.” Secrecy is essential to the protection of presidential prerogative. Follow the paper trail to the Mosler safe.
Even as the spotlight shines on the opaque Cheney, the light reflects on others as well. By shielding Bush from alternatives, Cheney has locked in certain decisions that Bush stubbornly defends as his own. The president’s plight is not that of a removed ruler tragically kept from knowing what his government is doing in his name. He has had time to observe the consequences. He is aware of what Cheney says to him. The Decider decides that Cheney will decide what the Decider decides. This is not a case of if-only-the-czar-knew. In the seventh year of his presidency, Bush’s decision making consists of justifying his previous decisions.
Of the Bush Cabinet secretaries, former Attorney General John Ashcroft most strenuously confronted Cheney about his seizures of power. Ashcroft was perhaps the most conservative member of the Cabinet, and it was out of a sense of his own constitutional obligation that he objected. When Ashcroft discovered that John Yoo, the deputy assistant in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had been recruited by the Cheney operation to write memos on detainee policy that would deny any role in the new legal process to the Justice Department, he was outraged. At the White House he confronted Cheney and Addington. “According to participants [at the meeting],” the Post reported, “Ashcroft said that he was the president’s senior law enforcement officer, supervised the FBI and oversaw terrorism prosecutions nationwide. The Justice Department, he said, had to have a voice in the tribunal process.” But Cheney did not relent. Ashcroft received no meeting to discuss the matter with Bush. Cheney was the gatekeeper — the decider for the Decider.
The narrative of Powell’s internal struggle with Cheney remains largely unknown. From conversations I have had with former senior CIA officials, it is clear that Powell himself does not fully understand all the ways he was misled, manipulated and abused in order to get him to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. To this day, Powell still does not really know what the CIA and the White House knew about weapons of mass destruction and when they knew it, largely because Cheney was so successful in his rigging of the intelligence process.
Powell’s performance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 10 demonstrated his continuing confusion. He wondered why the CIA didn’t tell him before his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, that the intelligence on mobile weapons laboratories wasn’t solid, even now unaware that CIA director George Tenet had been informed by CIA officers but dismissed their information because it ran counter to the case the administration wished to make for going to war.
Powell was caught between his diminished self-image as a loyal aide and good soldier indebted to a coterie of Republicans who had promoted him eventually to secretary of state, and his grandiose self-image as the most respected and popular public man in the country, and his influence imploded. He was strangely incapable of gaining political traction to hold his ground. Now the record cannot be changed. He can only learn how easily Cheney toyed with him.
Curiously absent in the lengthy Post articles, except in one brief passing scene, is Cheney’s ubiquitous shadow in his shadow presidency — his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Obsessed with secrecy, Cheney ordered Libby to ensure that one national security secret became public — the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert CIA officer. Now convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Libby awaits word from the federal appeals court on whether he will be able to stay his 30-month prison sentence. Steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the prosecutor, he continues his obstruction, protecting his principal. “There is a cloud over the vice president,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, in his closing remarks to the jury. “And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice.”
Despite the recent round of punditry that Cheney’s influence has waned, he remains a formidable force. These are Cheney’s final days; this is his endgame. He will never run again for public office. He is freed from the constraints of political consequences. He now has no horizon. He lives only in the present. He is nearly done. There are only months left to achieve his goals. Mortality impinges. Next month, he will have his heart pacemaker replaced. He disdains public opinion. He does not care who’s next. “We didn’t get elected to be popular,” he said on Fox News on May 10. “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.”
To the last minute, Cheney refuses to loosen his grip on power. Meanwhile, his former aides pump up pressure for a presidential pardon — a pardon that would enshrine Libby’s obstruction of justice and shield Cheney forever, “an entity in the executive branch” who would be above the law. A breeze is blowing a leaf toward an open window of the Oval Office.
Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of ‘The Clinton Wars’.
© 2007 Salon.com
“These are Cheney’s final days”
I am glad that someone is confident that Mr. Cheney will leave and stay gone. I’m not.
Then it IS true..Bush is just a pet monekey in an oval cage…and Cheney is Satan incarnate.
We don’t know “DICK”.
Are you so sure Cheney will NOT run for President??? Won’t the Republican National Committee pick him??? With the ultimate power right there, to truly take over this country??? And what about the voters being conned into “electing” him if there is some sort of great disaster (”terrorist” OR “coincidental”)???
I am REALLY worried!!!
I agree with locust; not with curlywhite. Cheney won’t run because he couldn’t get enough votes as a base from which to steal the rest. But I think there’s an excellent chance he won’t leave voluntarily either. Everyone uneasily joked about the 04 election being cancelled; well there was no need; they could maneuver close, and steal the rest. I think an election could be cancelled this time around; and it’s no joke. Only question is who goes along with any move; so far there has hardly been an aggressive response to his patently absurd assertions of not belonging to the executive branch after claiming years of executive privilege. Those who could do something appear to be too stunned by his brazenness to act. So what will stop him?
Uh, by far the easiest way for Cheney to maintain power is to get rid of the Chimpy Boy stooge. Cheney would then be the President.
“These are Cheney’s final days…He now has no horizon….Mortality impinges. Next month, he will have his heart pacemaker replaced.”
Reading it this way, with the ellipses in place, makes it sound like Cheney is just about to croak. I like that version best.
Alas, without the ellipses, it sounds more like a foreshadowing of some kind of “national emergency” of the kind necessary to implement Directive 51. For the sake of “constitutional continuity” of course.
These guys don’t plan on leaving office, folks. They had no qualms about breaking and entering in 2000 and 2004; do we seriously think they have qualms about staying longer than the 8 years the Constitution gives them? After all, you don’t get a PERMANENT war with impermanent administrations.
I think it would be wrong to assume that Cheney has an interest in the presidency or in keeping George in office. Cheney’s circle is not so small as to require a single president in office. He is not serving himself, as power hungry and arrogant as he is. He is serving a small group of interests and his purpose in being in the Vice Presidency with an idiot in the office above him is to ensure institutional changes that will last longer than his life time. Cheney does not want the nation’s highest office because it is too much scrutiny. He has been able to do so much because he is in an office that *should* be insignificant. An office that has only been important when the person in the Oval office has died.
The danger is not that we will have Bush and Cheney in office forever, but that we will have their legacy for many, many years to come. That we have a Supreme Court that will uphold all election stealing, just as it did in 2000 with better human beings on the Bench. The danger is that we have allowed so much prying into our emails, phone calls, lives that it will be easier for the Republicans to steal elections in the future. By the accounts of journalists who do more than report what they’re told, the electoral corruption in 2008 will be the worst by far.
We have a short time to completely discredit this administration and have the damage they’ve done open to the Public. I am appalled that Libby is to serve only 30 months. It fascinates me that hiding corruption of the highest order, facilitating the subversion of the government, carries with it such a lenient penalty. Libby ought to be imprisoned UNTIL his sense that secrecy serves a democratic people is ALTERED and he exposes Cheney. It is very likely that he will be pardoned, of course, before he serves even his paltry term. We need to put the pressure on our representatives to IMPEACH NOW, before the changes wrought by Cheney and Bush become the fabric of government.
As spokesliar Dana Perino said the other day: “The president sees himself and the vice-president as one.” If nothing else, this band of loons are the kings of the Freudian slip.
But Colin Powell does not get a pass. He called them crazies and did nothing. Suddenly he was just a “dupe,” one of the highest ranking military officers in the land? Turns out he was a bimbo? And, still, he does nothing to stop the insanity?
Arrest him for aiding and abetting traitors to our Constitution, drop him at Gitmo for a couple of weeks, and let’s see what he has to say then.
cheney couldn’t do none of this shite w/o lots of help. look who’s writing this article, a former clintonian. oooooh only if cheney weren’t around. oooooh cheney is so evil.
yes, he is. but there have been TONS of enablers along the way. and many of them ain’t republicans.
there are system-wide issues that cheney has just exploited. what do you do about the system? put Hillary in office?
I agree with those who don’t see Cheney letting go of power even with his cold, dead hands. I also agree that Libby, for his role in bringing down democracy in the United States, should get a prison term longer than a guy caught smoking a joint.
Ill-informed lackies who voted for good ol’ boy George were too stupid to realize they were actually getting Cheney. Bush’s early fall into irrelevance and obliviousness to it is summarized in a passage in one of Woodward’s books on the Bush administration. With Cheney and his coterie planning the second round of tax cuts for the filthy rich, the inept and ignorant Georgie boy is left on the sidelines muttering “Didn’t we already take care of them?”
It may be too late to stop Cheney already. How much does he know? How many secret orders did he give? Plame? Wellstone? 9/11? If Chimpy dies in a terrorist attack giving Cheney the opening for a martial law declaration, we’ll know, at least, that he was responsible for all those and more. Of course, by then it will be too late. RIP USA.
ballsy, you are so right “tons of enablers”. Speaking of Powell does anyone remember the “powell doctrine”, probably is a test question to this day at West Point. Well, Powell enabled GWB to go into Iraq via his much healded speech to the U.N. with his Peroe-like charts and satellite images, in COMPLETELY in contridiction to said Powell doctrine. I mean, what a f*cking hypocrisy. He was Presidential timber until this mess, I wonder if he ever philosophies about “what the future might have been?
Question to wcdevins: do believe Wellstone was murdred? Do you belive that Cheney had a hand in 9/11? What the hell are you sayng? Do you know of any proof? I mean I hate Cheney with a passion but lets have some fact if you gottem.
Drex - I am asking the same questions you are. I believe with Cheney all things evil are possible. Plame is a given. Wellstone, well, it would just have been too easy. 9/11 is just a little too convenient for his PNAC dream of “another Pearl Harbor”; more and more it looks like an inside job and who is more inside, or needed the job more, than Cheney? He answers to no one and has run his so-called shadow government with Rummy and the neocon cabal since the Reagan years. I know it’s hard to swallow, but we have to be willing to go there. What big secrets is he really hiding? We all know his energy task force had the Iraqi oilfield maps staked out, so that can’t be it.
Think about these 9/11 events - With America under attack, the President of the USA is left, alone and unprotected in a public school classroom while VP Cheney was immediately rushed into a DC bunker. Why wasn’t Bush surrounded by Secret Service agents and whisked into hiding? Why was Bush put on Air Force One when there was supposedly suspicious activity near the plane the day before, and it was supposedly a target that day? Why was Cheney given better protection by far than the President of the United States? Where was NORAD when those airliners shut off their transponders? And why had Cheney, in June of 2001, transferred the historic authority to scramble NORAD’s interceptors away from Air Force general in charge to the Office of the Vice President of the United States? Coincidence or conspiracy? - you be the judge.
If, after reading this account, you are left feeling as helpless as a spectator in the nickel seats, that probably serves as proof of the fictional status of American democracy, you know, government of, by and for the people.
I ask you, what possible reason could there by not to impeach Cheney? Law school freshmen are taught that a principal justification for rationing out punishment to convicted criminals is to discourage others from behaving in a similar fashion. Should Cheney drift out of office, after the laws he has broken and the damage he has done to life, liberty and property, with nothing left to do with the remainder of his life but to spend the hundreds of millions in blood money he has accumulated through war profiteering, what will America do about the next monster who chooses to use what’s left of the constitution for toilet paper? Have we lost our minds, or just our balls?
“We didn’t get elected to be popular,” Cheney said on Fox News on May 10. “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.”
The simple fact of the matter was, they never got elected at all, except by the Supreme Court. And even the Supremes could not have realized they were electing Cheney as president.
WmC - I think the court is complicit in Cheney’s rise to power. Antonin Scalia is Cheney’s drinkin’ and huntin’ buddy, and should have recused himself from the most pivotal case in US history. Yet he refused to recuse, because he too is above the law in his mind. He is Cheney’s PNAC co-conspirator. This court, which NEVER rules against state’s rights (that’s why Reagan/Bush41 appointed them) took a tortured logic “one-time only, don’t expect to use this case as precedent” detour to stop the state-mandated full recount in Florida. At least four of them knew about Cheney and what they were doing when they began dismantling our democracy.
“Next month, he will have his heart pacemaker replaced.”
combine that with
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/25/AR2007062501038.html
A GOP Plan To Oust Cheney
By Sally Quinn in the Washington Post
and you get Fred Thompson as vice president because Cheney is incapacitated by his heart condition.
The operation will give a justification for Cheney’s removal, but in reality there is a movement among Republicans to replace Cheney.
And if I am right and that is what happens, there is no democracy in the US. The US is run as an oligarchy.
The only way that people can get justice and fairness is with outstanding large percentages in favor of a program or law. And how do you get people even aware of their choices when the media is dominated by the oligarchy?
Democracy isn’t a workable form of government. The wealthy and powerful will always take over. They will take over the media and the corporations and the courts and the politcial positions.
Maybe it is inevitable that there is a republic of some sort and democracy when it works can only work on a small scale. Once a group becomes large then there are the inevitable people who want power who will take over and limit the democracy.
I want to be wrong.
nice piece, as an aside…what a brutal reduction of powell! well stated.