I must admit I'm a bit shocked to see the speed with which the story of Cheney's "fourth branch" theory of the Vice Presidency has gone from widely ignored to widely covered. True, The Washington Post's new four part series on Cheney may not be explicitly about this, but in covering Cheney's approach to the office in such extensive detail, it provides the details necessary to understand how Cheney has translated his bizarre theories about government into reality.
This section of the story does a particularly good job of explaining approach to governance:
Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."
Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals and information flow into the vice president's office from around the government, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviews that almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similar one-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to the vice president but little or no reaction flowing down.
There's already been extensive discussion about this story all over the blogosphere - Andrew Sullivan, Laura Rozen, Digby, Karen Tumulty, and Kevin Drum have all done a good job highlighting important segments and providing greater context - so at this point I don't feel I really have all that much to add. Other than this:
Reading the entire series will involve a fairly extensive time commitment, but given the central role Cheney has played in most, if not all, of the major mistakes of the past six years, it really is your obligation as a citizen to read the entire thing. So please, stop reading my blog and head on over to the Post.
UPDATE: As for the whole fourth branch theory, when even Glenn Reynolds is calling your ideas out as "a political and legal embarrassment," and "clever...but not smart," you know you have a very serious problem. And yes, I understand the point Mike Rappaport is making in response to Glenn, but frankly his point is missing the point of this whole discussion. Nothing in either our constitutional history or traditions either supports Cheney's claims, and the further back you go the more odd they sound.
If this really was how the Framer's intended the office to function, don't you think Jefferson would have used the substantial powers of this office to shape and/or block the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed by congress while he was serving as our Vice President? The Sedition Act was, after all, aimed explicitly at silencing a political movement that Jefferson himself was leading. Am I really supposed to believe that Thomas Jefferson of all people failed to understand the full powers of the office of the Vice Presidency? And that only now, thanks to the intellectual brilliance of Dick Cheney, we have uncovered a secret, long lost understanding of the original intent of many of Thomas Jefferson's best friends? Really?
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