The Vice President of the United States is saying, with a straight face, that he doesn't have to comply with an executive order (number 12958) requiring him to report on his handling of classified information because, get this, his duties as President of the Senate mean that he's not technically part of the Executive Branch.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines, because the most flagrant abuser of executive privilege in modern times has just stated that it is his official legal opinion that he is not subject to the rules and regulations governing the executive branch of the U.S. federal government. It's so on. We now get to find out, courtesy of Mr. Addington's slip-up, everything that was previously denied to us under the protections afforded the Office of the Vice President by the (aggressively interpreted) notion of executive privilege.
Oh wait. Nevermind. We don't, because Dick Cheney believes himself to be above the law, and anyone who tries to remind him that he is, in fact, a public servant and thus subject to the rules and regulations governing public servants just can't seem to find a way to hold him to account. Here's an idea: CALL THE POLICE! Isn't that what you do when someone breaks the law? You call the cops? Well, it seems that someone already did. The agency responsible for monitoring compliance with the executive order in question attempted to conduct a floor-check on Cheney's office, but they were blocked by Cheney's staff. With what, tear gas and tasers? They were acting on an executive order, how were they blocked? Well, they didn't take that lying down, they called the top cop in the country, the Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales. You know where this is going. They still have not received a response. The Department of Justice didn't, um, you know, call them back.
Those of you who support the right to bear arms on the theory that at some point you might have to defend yourself against the abuse of power by despots foreign or domestic, YOU SHOULD BE CLEANING YOUR BARRELS RIGHT ABOUT NOW. Seriously, what's it going to take? Does Dick Cheney have to dress up like the Hamburglar and scuttle around carrying a sack labeled "Your Rights & Freedoms" before you say to yourself "Golly, I wonder if that guy should be running the country?" Here's the kicker: Cheney's office, upon noticing that there was an official government entity trying to make sure that they were obeying the law, attempted to abolish that entity. They tried to eliminate that office. Oh. My. God. How stupid do you have to be not to understand what's going on here?
Just to recap: The Vice President of the United States, Richard Bruce Cheney, is a crook. For anyone who didn't get that. He's breaking the law. Not a minor law, either, he's breaking a law that is supposed to keep him from breaking EVERY OTHER LAW ON THE BOOKS, because it governs, directly, whether he has to tell anyone what he's doing.
Now, I can't be the only person who is up in arms about this. Apparently everybody in a position to bring the hammer down is afraid of this guy. Well I'll lay it out for you pigeon-livered sons of bitches in Congress: Dick Cheney asserts the right to abduct me, send me to Syria, torture me indefinitely, and have me beaten to death and forgotten about, BUT I'M CALLING HIM OUT. What the hell are you doing about it?
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11 comments:
Well said, great post.
oh my god, gabe, you are killing it.
for more car-crash horror you can't look away from, see this:
http://tinyurl.com/yuh78b
I should post that you sir are awesome, and kudos on the post. I hope when they drag you off to Syria they take me too because I don't think the executive branch has a way to help families of suspected terrorists pay the mortagage during lengthy "without charges" absences.
I appologise for my time away. It's been a busy week and I've meant to get back to you.
The VPOTUS does not have to comply with any executive order unless the POTUS says so. The POTUS is presumptively not only the author, but the only relevant ultimate interpreter of executive orders. Whatever the then-President says an executive order means — regardless of what it may or may not actually say, or what it was originally intended to mean — is what the executive order does effectively mean (using the word "effectively" quite literally). So does Mr. Cheney have a leg to stand on in that legal sense? Absolutely, as long as Dubya says so.
and he does:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney23jun23,0,863839.story
Now, when this administration amended Clintons original executive order, The lawyers knew EXACTLY what they were doing and knew this new executive order would exempt them from exactly this kind of questioning.
No law is being broken in this case because the executive order has given him the right to say technically he is not wholly apart of the Executive Branch. (Remember, Bush cannot fire Chenney)
Is it right? That's the ultimate question, I suppose. My initial feelings lean towards no, it's not right, but those are only feelings. It wasn't right for FDR to socialize our government with the NEW DEAL but people got over it (and some even love him for it).
Haha! Right. So you're saying that the President can issue an executive order that says "All executive employees must wear green pants on Wednesdays" and then assert that, despite what the text of the order says, the meaning of the order is that all executive employees must wear RED pants on Wednesdays, and thus the entire green-pantsed staff is subject to disciplinary action for disobeying an executive order?
Horseshit. You've been snorting too much unitary executive theory. The VP has to comply with the executive order because the executive order IS what Dubya said, and it's codified as such. The order means what it says, that's the whole point of saying it, and if Tweedledumb and Tweedletorture want to countermand it, they have to do so by issuing an amended executive order. Until then, they are in violation. You know, because of this idea called "rule of law" that has apparently been supplanted in your mind and the mind of the President (such as it is) by the "rule of whim." They're crooks, Dave, and they're fighting this thing and saying crazy stuff like "the VP isn't part of the executive" because they know that if everything they have done in secret comes to light, even diehard hero-worshippers like you are going to balk at letting them continue to operate in the manner to which they became accustomed during the Republican lapdog Congresses. Come towards the light, my dear little flat-earther.
Flat-earther. Cute moniker, however misguided. The problems here are two-fold:
1) You're convinced on mountains of speculation and very little, if any, real evidence, that our POTUS and VPOTUS are crooks. That's fine, but that still limits you to speculation.
2) Right or Wrong, The POTUS has the ultimate power of explaining his executive order to congress. If they don't like his explanation when they question him, They have the checks and balances power to Impeach him. Whatever it is that Cheney is hiding, if ever brought before a court, he WILL WIN because of Bush's ammending to a Clinton executive order. Period. There is no further debate on this.
There should be, I'll agree with you there, because it looks shady as hell with and administration that already has the worst PR ability in recent history.
But no ones going after him, because no one has a leg to stand on. The President signed the exectutive order, not congress. Now if Congress wants to go after him for that, they can, but they are not. Do you want to start a campaign now to get Bush thrown out. Go for it. But you know how bad it was for the country when the Republicans Impeached Clinton... and with just over a year to go, is it really worth the ultimate detriment to this country? I say no, just let them finish out their term and get the new guys (or girls) in there to start the same shit all over again.
[Continuing as though you didn't just dodge the question...]
So, in short, anything's legal as long as you don't get caught? And we shouldn't let blatant attempts at a coverup influence our opinion of our elected leaders, because a successful coverup leaves us with only speculation as to what they did? Sure, that's great. It's not as if allowing that sort of behaviour to go unaddressed could possibly be more detrimental to the country than a [gasp!] impeachment proceeding. There's no way that permitting the complete repudiation of the principles upon which this country was founded could be worse than the constitutionally mandated enforcement of the law. Hey, why don't we all just punch ourselves repeatedly in the groin for the next year and a half as well, just to pass the time, because at least it wouldn't be as uncomfortable as demanding transparency in our highest offices.
It sounds to me like perhaps somebody is getting nervous about the secret and illegal activities of the man he repeatedly called "perhaps the greatest American president ever" coming to light and destroying his entire cultural zeitgeist. Hmmmm? Could that be what's happening here?
Well, I recall you having great admiration for FDR. GWBush has been essentially playing from FDR's playbook as a war time president. I'm not that nervous about whatever has been going on behind the scenes that they don't want us to know. Every President before them has done it, and I'm sure more Presidents after will too. What I'm curious about is why you have such a hard-on for calling out this one in particular. Would you have done the same for Gore or Kerry had they been elected? I think you would have afforded them much more leniency in such matters.
Besides, your "constitutionally mandated enforcement of the law" has no place here. It's Bush's law that you have problems with. He signed that executive order. He was elected by the American people. He may not be the perfect American President, but who was? He was surely a better candidate than his opponents in the elections. I think History will judge him far better than the pundits and critics of the day do. But that is true of most presidents too. Even Lincoln was widely criticized and considered the worst president ever in his day. Give it some perspective. If you think it's important to have the meaningful transparency you want, lead the campaign. I'll support your effort. I just don't think it's worth it, afterall, you seem to be able to criticize your president on an open connection to the world and not get arrested for it. Ask a Chinese person if they can do that. We may not be as free as we want to be, but we are far freer than most in the world. Sure the campaign to be more free must push on, but then, I think the direction of your attacks are misguided. Try instead to go after things like Congress taking away the power of free-trade from the president because special interest groups and unions think it's shredding American jobs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/29/AR2007062902262.html
The protectionists are insulting you and your dollar far more than the administration _might_ be.
I'm going to bring you back, forcefully if necessary, to the subject at hand here, which is Bush's enabling of Cheney's blatant defiance of the law. Care to comment on that, or are you going to continue skipping down this bullshit-laden path you've constructed for yourself?
And on the subject of bullshit: referring to Bush as a "wartime president" as though he needs extra executive power and public leniency because he's prosecuting a war to defend the nation is evidence of either the most profound stupidity or a willful conspiracy to screw this country up. That's like saying that someone who cut his own leg off to get a disability check should be given sympathy because he's handicapped. Or that Ted Kennedy should be allowed to dictate and/or commute drunk-driving and manslaughter laws because of the horrible tragedy that befell him at Chappaquiddick.
Oh, and just to keep things entertaining, please include an irrelevant tangent about Roosevelt and a painfully strained analogy to Lincoln in your response. It's not real right-wing dogma without those perennial signifiers.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize Bush ASKED terrorism to kill Americans. Oh wait, he didn't, terrorists enabled themselves.
And yes, we can go back to your subject. You think Bush is enabling Cheney to defy the law.
Except that the law doesn't say that. Here go read this and you will see why Cheney is not breaking the law:
http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2007/06/does-cheney-hav.html
You're pretending that Iraq and the 9-11 attacks were related prior to Bush's invasion of Iraq on the phony pretext of a Hussein/Bin Laden relationship. Again. You have to stop doing that if you ever hope to be taken seriously. It's embarrassing. You're an adult.
Moving on, Beldar would have a point about Cheney's extra-executive status if Cheney had never invoked executive privilege. But, here in the real world, outside the right-wing echo chamber, we all know that Cheney DID invoke executive privilege and had his rationale that he was an entity within the executive branch ratified and inducted into precedent in Cheney v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia (2004). Insofar as the exercise of executive power is constitutionally granted to the President, anyone who acts as "an arm or eye of the executive" by way of delegation or ascension to the office via Article 25 is a de facto member of the executive branch and thus subject of the descriptor "entity within," no matter how many subsections Beldar chooses to reference, a conclusion that is pretty plainly obvious to anyone familiar with Myer v. United States (1926) or the subsequent Humphrey case. Triangulate that shit, bitch. On top of that, the instrument known as "executive order" is derived from the Article II instruction to the President to faithfully execute the law, courtesy of the interpretation of one James Madison (look him up). Therefore, not only is the President bound to enforce the order as it is written, but if at any time an executive order in any way attempts to create new law or runs counter to existing law, it loses its validity (per Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952)). Since the Act creating the NARA in 1934 gives the agency the right to inspect government documents unless they are decided to be of a confidential nature and codified as such within the accepted classification system, and Cheney has attempted to bypass the rules on classification by inventing the designation "Treat as: [classification]," any executive order that gives him the power to deny inspection of said documents runs counter to the Act.
All of which puts Cheney's defenders in an awkward position: do you guys accept that he is in violation of the order and that Bush is delinquent in his duties for failing to enforce it, or do you contend that Bush's amendment giving Cheney broadened classification authority is illegal, and then re-open the Plame investigation in that light?
Bush support has become quite the quagmire, hasn't it?
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