It’s nice when you can decide what level of accountability you will be held to, isn’t it? After all, that’s the hallmark of the “unitary executive.”
Dick Cheney’s lawyers are asserting that the vice president alone has the authority to determine which records, if any, from his tenure will be handed over to the National Archives when he leaves office in January.
That claim is in federal court documents asking that a lawsuit over the records be dismissed. Cheney leaves office Jan. 20, potentially taking with him millions of records that might otherwise become public record.
”The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law,” according to a court filing by Cheney’s office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.
The point under contention is the Presidential Records Act of 1978. I don’t think George W. Bush issued a signing statement on that one, but …
he 1978 Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives immediately upon the end of the president’s last term of office and gives the archivist responsibility to preserve and control access to presidential records. The law ended the tradition of private ownership of presidential papers, opening White House records to the public and historians.
But the law carves out exceptions for personal or purely partisan records.
National Archives officials have said records of Cheney’s dealings with the Republican National Committee would not require preservation under the law. As of November, it had not made a final determination on the status of Cheney’s records produced when he acts as president of the Senate, which he says are exempt.
Right. That’s the whole “The VP’s office is executive when it’s convenient, and legislative when convenient, and f**k you when my idea of convenience doesn’t match yours” theme of the Cheney vice-presidency.
But the law is unclear on how disagreements will be decided about the preservation of disputed records, said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
”Decisions that are made in the next couple of weeks may prove irrevocable. If records are held from the archivist now they may never be recovered,” Aftergood said.
Precisely what VP Cheney and his legal team are hoping for.
The arrogance and chutzpah are such that it would make a convincing case for some sort of judgmental afterlife simply to comfort oneself with an image of Cheney being poked with pitch forks for a millennium or two.
It’s a great pity Cheney will never see the inside of a jail cell for his abuses of power over the past eight years.
My gut thought is that he deserves the fate of Benito Mussolini – due process ought not to apply to wannabe dictators.
Yeah, and then I see the “impeach! impeach! socialist one-worlder Muslim tyrant!” crowd circling around Obama, just like earlier lunatics circled Clinton, and I’m just as glad we have “due process.”
Yes, you do have a good point there. But there’s still something sickening about how Clinton was hounded over relatively trivial wrongs while the Bush junta got away with such far-reaching crimes.
What they managed to do by impeaching Clinton on politically-motivated partisan charges was discredit the impeachment process itself. I can’t help believe that that was their plan all along.
Gosh- and to think I will never be free because I have a Constitutional Monarch, and gun control. I wish I had the freedom to keep voting crooks and their mates into office:- Nixon, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Shrub, Rumfeld (again) Cheney (again).
What was it- you couldn’t believe what they done the first time round- started illegal wars to overthrow governments, sold weapons to murderous dictators, kicked the working man- that you thought that you’d run the experiment again to see if you got the same results? I mean, fine scientific sentiment and all that, but there are some things that Man Should Not Know (Cue lightning over the Whitehouse, Vincent Price in Oval Office)
The mills of the electorate grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The elections of 2004 will go down, I predict, as an anomoly in the American electorate (insert here that 2/3 of the party faithful will vote the party slate regardless of a “live boy / dead girl” smoking gun). 1. The Dems nominate as unlikeable a guy as they possibly could have (Kerry), 2. Ohio was subjected to electoral shenanigans as dubious as Illinois in 1960. One can be both dismayed that the election as as close as it was and that it ended up on the Bush side of the world.