Donald Trump gestures next to Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was killed in Maryland last year, during a campaign rally at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 4, 2024.
President Donald Trump has struggled immensely to get what he wants in the Kennedy Center debacle. Despite his best efforts, his name does not appear on the side and he has not gotten the courts to intervene on his behalf. Now, in a possible move to avoid further scrutiny, the Trump administration is drawing from a precedent set by a past vice president he has previously insulted.
Vice President Dick Cheney — who Trump previously described as "irrelevant" and said he was "not a fan," and whose supporters have joined in openly reviling — set a precedent which stated that certain executive bodies did not have to follow the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires otherwise-sensitive records to be available to the public. Trump's lawyers are now drawing from that same precedent to argue Trump should not be forced to disclose information about his efforts to rename the Kennedy Center.
"The DOJ, in response to Kennedy Center board of trustees member Rep. Joyce Beatty's motion to compel discovery, told U.S. District Judge Christopher 'Casey' Cooper on Wednesday that the Democratic lawmaker's requests should fail across the board," reported Law and Crime's Matt Naham on Thursday."The DOJ first mentioned Cheney v. United States in the opening paragraph of the filing."
In the filing, the Trump administration argued that "requests for discovery that pertain to the President of the United States are no ordinary matter. Instead, they raise distinct separation-of-powers concerns. Both the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit have recognized as much time and again," the filing said. "Thus, a plaintiff may not serve overbroad discovery requests on the President and expect a line-by-line response. See Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for D.C., 542 U.S. 367, 388 (2004)."
This is not the first time that Cheney's legacy of expanding the power of the executive branch has helped Trump implement his own agenda.
In a 2025 op-ed for the New York Times, Ron Suskind argued that "[Cheney] wrote a playbook of how to exercise executive authority beyond constitutional boundaries and the rule of law. Donald Trump has added pages and is working on a sequel."
From invading Iraq despite questionable evidence, establishing mass surveillance throughout the United States and declaring emergencies to achieve his goals through executive orders, Cheney made it possible for the executive branch to act on its own authority in ways not seen before.
"Disastrous as those all actions were, Mr. Trump has undertaken even more significant expansions of power and illegality, often under even more dubious claims of emergency," Suskind observed. "... Mr. Cheney made it possible."
