by digby
This is interesting. A reader over at TPM writes:
Incidentally, Josh, you must have noticed that Bush’s very expansive claims of executive authority are being made by the first President in our history to delegate to his Vice President anything close to the authority over policy and personnel that he has ceded to Cheney. Back in 1980 the GOP Convention audience was kept amused by an effort to establish a “co-Presidency” with Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, who’d have been given extensive authority if elected. Reagan decided then that it was a stupid idea; he wasn’t running to be half a President. And now we have a President weak enough to make the “co-Presidency” a reality.
I was thinking along similar lines earlier today:
These people are proving that a president can get away with anything (but an illicit blowjob) if he’s willing to push the envelope. And that is exactly what Dick Cheney set out to do when he chose himself to be the defacto president back in 2000.
It truly is amazing that a vice president has not only wielded such power but has also stated openly that his goal in office was to expand executive authority:
In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.
President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.
“I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff,” Cheney said.
Most of Cheney’s colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of “disdain for the law.”
Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”
The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power — nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president’s hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast “inherent” powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.
Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration’s hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney’s staff has also been behind President Bush’s record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws.
A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
That’s a practical problem for the US government and an abstract philosophical point — until you realize that the most powerful vice president in history, who could never have been elected president in his own right, pretty much appointed himself vice president to a man he knew was an imbecile. How very convenient.
This reminds of this essay by Michael Lind* from ’03 that I’ve always found fascinating:
How did the neocon defense intellectuals – a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic – manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father’s, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck – Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney’s right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
Never forget that John McCain’s BFF in the 2000 election was Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard braintrust. They used to call it “National Greatness” conservatism or “benevolent hagemony” but they’re really just obfuscatory terms for American imperialism or world domination.
These are the people who Dick Cheney, the accidental vice president, brought into the government. They did it during the truncated transition and while Junior was off on a partridge hunt with Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar and James Baker was busy in Florida:
Once in Spain, Bush, Knight and the executives were joined by Norman Schwarzkopf and proceeded to a private estate in Pinos Altos, about 60 kilometers from Madrid, to shoot red-legged partridges, the fastest game birds in the world. Bush impressed the hunting party as a fine wing shot and a gentleman — the 76-year-old former president was not above offering to clean mud off the boots of his fellow hunters. Throughout the trip, Bush kept in touch with the election developments via e-mail. By Saturday, Nov. 11, a machine recount had shrunk his son’s lead in Florida to a minuscule 327 votes. “I kind of wish I was in the U.S. so I could help prevent the Democrats from working their mischief,” he told another hunter in his party.
On Tuesday, November 14, Bush and Schwarzkopf arrived in England, where Brent Scowcroft joined them and they continued their game hunting on Bandar’s estate. They kept a close eye on the zigs and zags of the recount battle. As a power play to demonstrate his confidence to the media, the Democratic Party, and the American populace, George W. Bush announced the members of his White House transition team even before the Florida vote-count battle was over.
I’m not sure what it all means except that Cheney is an undemocratic, power-mad freak, which we already knew. But as I watching what’s emerging from the Libby Trail, it’s more and more apparent that his dark influence on the empty codpiece was …. no accident.
*Let us all add Lind to the list of intellectuals who were right about the war and are ignored by the media. He is not only an intellectual, he works at a centrist think tank, he used to be a Republican and he is from Texas. What more do they want? This piece was written in April of 2003, right after the invasion and it was right on.
But no, let’s listen to all the usual suspects be wrong over and over again.
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