Amazing. In his most recent bid to avoid anything remotely similar to accountability, Dick Cheney has taken the position that the Vice-President of the
That sound you hear is generations of Constitutional law professors dropping their teeth.
A bit of backgound: The National Archives oversees classified documents. An Executive Order requires that all members of the Executive Branch who are entitled to see such documents cooperate with the National Archives to ensure that sensitive materials are protected. For the past four years, Cheney has simply refused to comply. When the folks at the National Archives appealed to the Justice Department (the proper channel, however futile an appeal to Alberto Gonzales is likely to be), Cheney simply claimed that this law—like so many others—doesn’t apply to him, because he is not part of the executive branch.
As Maureen Dowd mused in the Sunday New York Times, “Even in my harshest musings about the vice-president, I never imagined that he would declare himself not only above the law, not only above the president, but actually his own dark planet—a separate entity from the White House.”
As other commentators have noted, this position raises some fascinating questions, among them why, if Cheney isn’t a member of the Executive Branch, he keeps claiming Executive privilege.
Or why, since the clear language of the Executive Order applies to anyone “entitled to receive classified documents,” it even matters, for purposes of the rule’s application, what he calls himself.
As Representative Rahm Emanuel recently stated, announcing legislation to remove the Vice-President’s office from an upcoming funding bill, “The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. If he demands executive branch funding, he cannot ignore executive branch rules.”
This bizarre episode would be funny if it didn’t point up a tragic truth: this is an Administration that does not adhere to nor operate under the most fundamental American value—the value of the rule of law.
From Abu Ghraib to Valerie Plame, from signing statements to
Maybe that sound isn’t Con Law professors’ teeth dropping. Maybe it is the sound of the nation’s Founders, spinning in their graves.