Opinion

Out of control

FOR THE last six years, Vice President Dick Cheney has seized myriad opportunities to reassert the executive branch authority that he believes was unduly curtailed after the Watergate scandal.

Time after time, Cheney has directly or indirectly played a role in White House efforts to aggressively expand presidential powers and limit oversight by Congress, the press and the public. He refused to reveal the participants in secret meetings he convened to come up with a national energy policy. He and his legal advisers were driving forces behind the administration's attempt to wiretap domestic calls without judicial review and to routinely add "signing statements" to legislation that claim a presidential prerogative to selectively ignore parts of the law -- most infamously, involving a prohibition on the use of torture against detainees. The vice president's office has insisted on "exclusive control" over the logs on who visits with Cheney at the White House compound or the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory.

In view of Cheney's history of fierce resistance to the most basic elements of oversight, perhaps no one should be surprised that the vice president would try to block the National Archives' routine attempt to collect data from his office on how much information he is classifying and declassifying.

But this Cheney stonewall is remarkable because it involves the fulfillment of a presidential order.

Even more bizarre is his rationale for why his office should be exempt. Cheney essentially invokes a separation of powers argument because of his legislative branch duties. Under the U.S. Constitution, Cheney does serve as president of the Senate, and can be called upon to break tie votes. But the idea that he is "not an entity within the executive branch," and thus exempt from a presidential order, is both ludicrous and chilling.

So much for Dick Cheney's talk about the principle of restoring the powers of the presidency. This latest flap is about the arrogance and contempt for accountability of one vice president: him.