Mondale issues blistering attack on Cheney

MinnPost.com | March 25, 2008

Former Vice President Walter Mondale today accused the current vice president, Dick Cheney, of a wholesale assault on the Constitution, the balance of powers, and the system that evolved since World War II to coordinate intelligence and defense policy.

“They wrecked that system,” Mondale said this morning at a University of Minnesota scholarly conference on the vice presidency.

This isn’t some academic difference of opinion over the proper balance between branches of the federal government, Mondale said, during a question and answer session.

In the case that led to the conviction of Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Mondale said Cheney functioned as “an ideological enforcer, silencing dissent, punishing critics, to sustain a flawed war policy based on cooked facts. It’s all there. Read the case.”

Mondale argued that freedom from higher political ambition freed Cheney to disrespect the Congress, the American people and the law.

Mondale said: “The other morning, Mr. Cheney was on ‘Good Morning America.’ A reporter asked him: ‘Well, polls now show that two thirds of the American people are opposed to this war. Shouldn’t that mean something?’ And [Cheney] said, ‘So?’

“Y’know, maybe he didn’t say it correctly or say it the way he meant it. And I don’t say that public opinion should govern everything. But public opinion deserves respect and the president and the vice president ought to be worried about it.

“I think our vice president ought to wake up every morning, like I did, wondering what he can do to enhance public support and respect. And I believe an election-free unaccountable vice president, clothed with some of the aura and power of the president may, as this vice president has, act as though he were beyond accountability to anybody but the president — beyond the reach of the Congress, the court, the press, the Constitution and the American people.

“It scares me and I think we ought to be thinking about it this fall as we pick a vice president.”

“I think this was a brutal, deliberate policy to ignore a wide range of written laws and constitutional principles and the legitimate powers of Congress…It’s different than anything we’ve seen in American history and I think it ought to be seen not as two responsible positions, but ought to be seen as a dramatic challenge to American’s system of government.”

Mondale added: “It’s not that difficult. If you’re doing something that’s against the law, stop it…We never thought we had the right to ignore laws that were clearly applicable to the president.”

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