How Dick Cheney's Radical Acts in the White House Still Threaten Our Democracy

The following is an excerpt from David Swanson's new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories, 2009), drawn from Chapter 8: "The Cheney Branch" on Dick Cheney's power grab and radical transformation of the vice presidency during Bush's presidency.

What was once a position to stand as back-up should the president die or become unable to serve is now, it would seem, a branch of government all of its own. On June 22, 2007, Time magazine ran an article with the headline "The Cheney Branch of Government," that began thus:

On the same day that the CIA announced it will soon release hundreds of pages of once-classified documents that detail some of the agency's most closely guarded -- and controversial -- secrets of old, it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting even his own Executive Branch's efforts to find out what kind of secret material his office has been stashing away over the last four years.

Cheney's office, according to a story first reported by the Chicago Tribune, has resisted attempts by a tiny federal agency to compile information -- in accordance with an executive order signed by George Bush himself -- on the classified documents being held by the Vice President's operation. Cheney's office argued that the Vice President's office, because it has both executive and legislative branch duties, is exempt from the order. Cheney's dustup with the normally non-controversial National Archives and Records Administration is the latest reminder that Cheney believes he can play by his own rules. And it probably secures for Cheney a place alongside Richard Nixon in the Washington pantheon of secret-keepers.

Actually, Nixon doesn't even come close. Nixon never kept as much of our government secret as Bush-Cheney did, and when push came to shove, he gave up some of his secrets and left town. Nixon's former legal counsel John Dean agrees that the Cheney-Bush gang far surpassed Nixonian levels of secrecy and abuse of power. Not to mention lawyerly deviousness. Cheney claimed privileges supposedly belonging to the executive branch when it suited him. For example, he refused to comply with subpoenas because "the president and the vice president are constitutional officers and don't appear before the Congress." At other times, Cheney claimed to be part of Congress in order to avoid complying with rules governing the executive branch. Hence the conclusion that if Cheney belonged to any branch it had to be the hitherto unheard of Dick Cheney Branch, which perhaps existed in Cheney's well-known "undisclosed location." Speaking of which, the fact that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that Vice President Joe Biden will reveal the nature of the bunker Cheney created at the vice presidential residence makes a nice analogy for how power accumulates from one ruler to the next. It's much easier to create and pass down than it is to refuse. Still, the first few months of the Obama-Biden administration gave every indication that Biden would not exercise the sort of power that Cheney had.

All in all, Dick Cheney dramatically enlarged the powers of the vice presidency, claiming for it authority that rightfully belongs to other sections of the government, or to no section of government at all. These powers will lie around like a loaded weapon on the vice presidential estate and in the White House. These powers may be abused by any new duumvirate in the near or distant future.

In the Constitution the vice president is given the succession to power should the president be removed from office, but he or she is also made the president of the Senate and given the power to break a tie there. Had Dick Cheney gone out of his way to comply with the rules governing both the executive and the legislative branches, probably nobody would have complained (although some of us might have fainted from shock). There wasn't any actual conflict between the vice president's two roles of breaking ties and sitting around until the president died. Cheney didn't need to keep his executive activities secret in order to properly preside over the Senate. He simply latched onto an excuse, regardless of how nonsensical, and proceeded to do as he chose. The legislative duties of the vice president were also expanded under Cheney from hanging around in case he needed to break a tie vote to participating in Republican caucus meetings, often bringing presidential advisor Karl Rove with him. Senator Patrick Leahy said he believed this new involvement was meant to encourage Republicans to put party loyalty ahead of institutional loyalty. In addition to this legislative power, executive branch duties of the vice president in the case of Cheney expanded to include presidential power.