Take Him at His Word
So Dick Cheney is back in front-page news. It seems he feels the vice presidency is not part of the executive branch of government.
Wait…what? Excuse me?
The motivation for this claim is a presidential executive order—reversed by Bill Clinton during his terms of office, and reinstated by Bush the lesser—that requires executive branch offices to give the Information Security Oversight Offices archival data on material those executive branch offices have classified and declassified. The idea of the presidential order is to enable the National Archives to protect national security information by keeping tabs on what is and is not classified.
Not only has the vice president refused to report that information, but has further refused even to give a tally on how much has been classified. Not even a simple count. The current administration has vastly increased the classification of government documents, including re-classifying documents which had already been released to public scrutiny years before. This last policy is so nonsensical as to prove that whoever is running the White House considers secrecy a virtue in its own right. Foreign spies with an interest in the information have already got their copies; the only people kept in the dark by reclassification are our own citizens. Democracy works best, according to the White House, when its citizens are kept ignorant of government activity. If a simple count of the number of documents classified is dangerous, it isn’t dangerous to national interests—only to the national leadership’s interests.
The overtly stated policy of our current executive to expand executive privilege to the point of independence from the other two branches of government scares me. The very attempt to make presidential (or vice presidential) activity secret from, and therefore unaccountable to the voters, scares me. The blatant attempt to destroy our system of checks and blances scares me. When did “conservative” come to mean “embracing the dismantling of the guiding principles of the constitution”? The fact that Cheney seeks to disobey the rules laid out by his own president demonstrates a deep-seated belief that the president (and vice president) should rest entirely above the laws, including its own. The executive’s act of making itself secret alone justifies using powerful legal and political tools to break that secrecy, and justifies using those tools more aggressively than would be justified with a more candid presidency.
Fortunately, there is a remedy, if someone has the guts to apply it quickly and firmly. Accept the vice president at his word. The vice presidency is not part of the executive branch of government; the vice president is simply a humble functionary without any legal participation in any of the three branches. As such, he can make no claim whatsoever to executive privilege. Not an executive, no executive privilege. Simple as that. His office may therefore be exempt from a specific presidential order to offices in the executive branch to disclose its activities, but it is entirely without a leg to stand on if subpoenaed by Congress. The vice president, by his own admission, is not an “entity within the executive branch.” He is therefore no longer privileged to enjoy the safeguards of our system of checks and balances; he must comply with any laws Congress should care to establish, without recourse to executive privileges of any kind.
Now. Let’s subpoena every damned document, memo, and record it’s created in the past seven years. Let’s see what we find.