The Blue State

Leahy subpoenas White House and Cheney

Patrick Leahy wants all documents pertaining to the White House's warrantless wiretap program:

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and VicePresident Dick Cheney's office today for documents relating toPresident Bush's controversial eavesdropping program that operatedwarrant-free for five years.

Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy,D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council.The four parties have until July 18 to comply, according to a statementby Leahy's office.

So you can't say this is all about Democrats trying to put Cheney under the hot seat.  Congress has been trying to get this information for quite some time.  Enough is enough.

A press release from Leahy gets into more detail of what his Judiciary Committee wants:

The subpoenas seek documents related to authorization and reauthorization of the program or programs; the legal analysis or opinions about the surveillance; orders, decisions, or opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) concerning the surveillance; agreements between the Executive Branch and telecommunications or other companies regarding liability for assisting with or participating in the surveillance; and documents concerning the shutting down of an investigation of the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) relating to the surveillance.

On Deadline, a USA Today blog, says there are no signs the White House will comply. This could prompt a showdown in the courts.

Cheney took advantage of Bush's disinterest for detail

For the last few days, the Washington Post has been running a four-part series on the unprecedentedly powerful role that the Vice President has played in this Administration.  Today, the Post took a look at why Dick Cheney was able to exert his power to the fullest extent?  Quite simply, George W. Bush is not a student of detail, and was more than willing to defer power to the Vice president.  Unfortunately though, if someone else controls what the President is told, that makes the messenger the most powerful in the Administration:

"Dick's major concern, one of them was, and I agree, that thereneeds to be a greater and more effective role for the vice president,"Marsh, a longtime Cheney friend, said in an interview. "He holds theview, as do I, that the vice president should be the chief of staff ineffect, that everything should run through his office."

In Bush, Cheney found the perfect partner. The president'swillingness to delegate left plenty of room for his moredetail-oriented vice president.

"My impression is that the president thinks that the Reagan style ofleadership is best -- guiding the ship of state from high up on themast," said former White House lawyer Bradford A. Berenson. "It seems to me that the vice president is more willing to get down in the wheelhouse below the decks."

Cheney was really the one guiding the ship, not Bush:

Scores of interviews with advisers to the president and vice president,as well as with other senior officials throughout the government, offera backstage view of how the Bush White House operates.  The president is "the decider," as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.

This is like a voluntary coup de tat.   George W. Bush gave up power that President's are supposed to have, reducing his own role, and making Dick Cheney the brains behind Executive Branch policy.

Cheney instructs Bush to ignore legislature and judiciary

The second part in a four-part Washington Post series about Dick Cheney focused on the Vice President's role in formulating the legal strategy to justify harsh interrogation methods.  Unfortunately for the Administration, a number of court rulings last year determined that water-boarding and other cruel and humane interrogation practices were illegal.  To fight back, Cheney instructed Bush to just simply ignore the legislature and judiciary:

Two questions remain, officials said. One involves techniques to beauthorized now. The other is whether any technique should be explicitlyforbidden. According to participants in the debate, the vice presidentstands by the view that Bush need not honor any of the new judicial andlegislative restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently restatedCheney's argument that when courts and Congress "purport to" limit thecommander in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutionalprerogative to disregard them.

Cheney is trying to further the Nixonian constitutional doctrine that the Executive Branch leads while the other two branches follow.  Of course, if the Executive Branch can just disregard the legislature and judiciary, you have to ask why the latter two should even exist?  Also, if the Executive Branch is the most powerful, then how come the framers put the Legislative Branch in Article I, and the Executive back in Article II?  Maybe the framers were warning us about monarchies.

Rahm Emanual wants to defund Cheney's office

You've got to like logic behind this.  If Cheney thinks he is not part of the Executive Branch, then why should his office get any Executive funding?:

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois isthreatening to defund the office of the vice president in response torevelations that Dick Cheney is locked in a dispute with the NationalArchives over the preservation of classified documents.

Emanuel plans to offer an amendment to a spending bill next week todefund Cheney's office. The vice president's office contends that, aspresident of the Senate, he and his staff are not a part of executivebranch but rather an office in the legislative branch.

"The Vice President has a choice to make," Emanuel said in astatement. "If he believes his legal case, his office has no businessbeing funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demandsexecutive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules."

This could just be something to fire up the blogosphere.  But ifCongressman Rahm Emanual (D-IL) follows through and presses hard forthis, it will be the most significant effort to restrict Cheney's power.

That Washington Post article today is really raising the pressure on the Vice President's office.

Report: Cheney thinks he is exempt from the rules of governing

Part one of a four-day report in the Washington Post about Dick Cheney takes a glance at the extent to which the Vice President's office shields themselves from transparency.  The report draws on more than 200 sources, and exposes the source of secrecy behind inflated Executive Branch power:

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengthsto avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or eventhe size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar andordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His generalcounsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office thatis neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislativebranch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney isrefusing to observe an executive order on the handling of nationalsecurity secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office thatinsisted on auditing his compliance.

In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals andinformation flow into the vice president's office from around thegovernment, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviewsthat almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similarone-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to thevice president but little or no reaction flowing down.

All those methods would be on clear display when the "war on terror" began for Cheney after eight months in office.

This is an extraordinary concept.  Cheney works through both branches of government, therefore he is above all government.  What this all means is Cheney is the decider, not Bush.

More likely that Lynne Cheney will take Wyoming Senate seat

Last week, the blogosphere buzzed that the Vice President's wife Lynne Cheney might be nominated to fill the open Wyoming Senate seat, vacated by Craig Thomas, who recently passed away.  In the beginning, it was only a rumor.

Now, as the AP tells the Star Tribune, a spokesperson for Lynne Cheney is refusing to deny that she is interested in the Senate seat:

A spokesperson for Lynne Cheney, wife of thevice president, would not deny that she, too, was a candidate for theU.S. Senate seat, according to The Associated Press.

The committee will present the list of thethree top vote-getters to Freudenthal (the governor), who then has five days to chooseThomas's replacement.

With the deadline on the 19th of June, we should know by the beginning of next week weather she is indeed throwing her name into the hat.

Governor Freudenthal is a Democrat, but has agreed to go with whoever the Wyoming Republican Party nominates as the replacement.  If Lynne becomes Senator, it will mark the first time in American history that a husband and wife have served in the Senate at the same time.  (Remember, the Vice President is also the President of the Senate.)

Remember, this is the same Lynne Cheney that smeared Jim Webb last October for including sexually explicit material in a novel, despite the fact that one of her novels contained scenes describing a lesbian love affair.

Surprise, Cheney behind warrantless wiretaps after all

All roads point to Dick Cheney.  In 2004, when Alberto Gonzales was sent to awkwardly argue with hospital-bound John Ashcroft about warrantless wiretaps, Dick Cheney may have been the one behind it all:

Vice President Dick Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House  meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft , who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey .

This was all revealed during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday.

Dick Cheney is a product of the post-Watergate era when officials in the Ford Administration had to work with limited executive power.  That really frustrated Cheney.  Ever since then, he has been on a mission to reestablish White House power the way it was under Nixon.  So far, he has been quite successful.

Strange coincidence behind Cheney's destruction of records

Vice President Dick Cheney asked the Secret Service last September to delete the records of which political figures visited his residence.  Cheney's lawyers cited the Presidential Records Act of 1978 as an excuse. 

This is all part of a court battle involving an advocacy group that says Cheney must turn over his logs because they are subject to the Freedom of Information Act:

The Justice Department filed the letter Friday in a lawsuit by aprivate group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visitedCheney at his official residence.

The ironic part about all this is the fact that an unidentified member of the Senate has placed a secret hold on a bipartisan bill specifically designed to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act.  Since Dick Cheney is the president of the Senate in addition to being Vice President, is it possible that he is the one secretly placing the hold on the bill?   That would be something!

Editorial: Rice's influence now trumps that of Cheney

I wrote on Friday about the bitter disagreement within the Administration over how to tackle the Iran issue.  On one side, there is Condoleezza Rice and the State Department, who favor diplomatic pressures.  Then on the other end of the pendulum, Dick Cheney and the American Enterprise Institute, who are dead-set against bilateral talks with the Iranians.  The real question is who will President Bush side with -- Cheney or Rice?  In Friday's column, I noted that Rice had the upper hand.  Within the last few hours, there is more evidence of that.

The Administration has disbanded a council called the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, which had originally been designed to coordinate aggressive actions against the Iranian government.  This is a major setback for Cheney:

The interagency group, known as the Iran Syria Policy and OperationsGroup, met weekly throughout much of 2006 to coordinate actions such ascurtailing Iran's access to credit and banking institutions, organizingthe sale of military equipment to Iran's neighbors, and supportingdemocratic forces that oppose the two regimes.

State Departmentand White House officials said the dissolution of the group was simplya bureaucratic reorganization, but many analysts saw it as evidence ofa softening in the US strategy toward the two countries.

Just because Condoleezza Rice's side is winning out does not mean the threat of military force has been eliminated.  After all, Rice is pretty hawkish herself.  But unlike Cheney, Rice probably understands that efforts to undermine the Iranian government will only make president Ahmadinejad more motivated to obtain nuclear weapons, mostly out of fear that we would invade.

Analysis: Cheney's commencement speech at West Point

Earlier this morning during a commencement speech at West Point, Dick Cheney tried to justify why we are in Iraq today:

Their (the terrorists') ultimate goal is to establish atotalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. Theyview the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again.  And nowthey have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war againstcivilization.  In Iraq today, the al Qaeda network that struck America is one of theelements trying to destroy a democratic government.

...America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because thatis where they have gathered.

Of course, Cheney did not correctly state that al Qaeda was not welcomed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that it wasn't until we began our occupation there when al Qaeda made it their central front.

His logic is disturbingly stunning.  Al Qaeda is there in mass because of our occupation.  So in order to win, we will have to kill every single member of the network in Iraq, hope that the organization has a 0% recruitment rate, and hope that no new foreign al Qaeda fighters enter the country.  Those are odds that not even a chronic gambler would bet on.

But that's okay, Cheney.  Keep going:

And we are there because the security of this nation depends on asuccessful outcome.

Just because you want an outcome does not mean you can obtain it.

Then, to top it all off, Cheney dropped this line:

Yet there's reason forconfidence as more locals get into the fight, as more good intelligencecomes in, as the government stays focused on the hard work of nationalreconciliation.

And how is it a good thing when more locals join neighborhood militias?

You can view the full text of his speech here.