The Pluribus Driver

Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by Chris Wallace yesterday morning on Fox News Sunday. He had many interesting (and irritating) things to say. They touched first upon the auto industry bailout that President Bush announced on Friday. One thing Cheney said was:

I think, you know, we talk about the Congress being critical. They had ample opportunity to deal with this issue and they failed. The president had no choice but to step in.

What he failed to mention was that it was members of his own party that have been blocking the bailout package, a fact that is not at all surprising, since the Republicans in the Senate have been little more than obstructionists ever since the Democrats took over in January of 2007.

The thing that he said that really bugged me was this:

I mean, the fact of the matter is that, especially given the kind of conflict we’re faced with today, we find ourselves in a situation where I believe you need strong executive leadership.

What we did in this administration is to exert that kind of authority. We did it in a manner that I believe and the lawyers that we looked to for advice believed was fully consistent with the Constitution and with the laws of the land.

Cheney has believed in a “strong executive” at least since the early 70s, when Nixon enjoyed arguably the broadest powers of any president. Ever since Congress started reigning in executive power following Watergate, Cheney has wanted to expand it. This was his reasoning when he stood against Congress (as a representative) during the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

…

[Cheney] commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”

And of course, one has to keep in mind that when Cheney says they consulted lawyers regarding the constitutionality of their actions, he’s referring to people like Alberto Gonzalez, who has shown utter disdain for the law and especially for Congress, who he lied to and ignored a subpoena from, and John Yoo, who was the author of an infamous memo in which he justifies the administration’s authorization of torture.

Later, Wallace asked Cheney:

Was it worth it? Did the decisions that you helped set in place on interrogation, on detention, on - - on surveillance, did they, in fact, save lives that you would maintain would not have been saved under the old rules?

Cheney of course said yes. When asked to give an example, he replied:

Well, I guess I’d direct you to the intelligence agencies involved, but I know specifically of attacks that were thwarted. Think of the airliner attack that was planned out of Heathrow when they were going to hijack … six airliners and blow them up over American cities.

So to justify the admnistration’s sweeping abrogation of our civil liberties, and the almost unprecedented expansion of executive power, Cheney refers to an alleged plot that was foiled by British police working on a tip from Pakistan. A case in which,

On 8 September 2008 after more than 50 hours of deliberations, the jury did not find any of the defendants guilty of conspiring to target aircraft.

He predictably has no qualms over any of the actions they’ve taken or policies they’ve enacted. I get the feeling that he’s a real ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy. It’s no real secret anymore that Cheney has wanted for quite some time to change the office of president to one of near-imperial power. I wonder just how far he may have been willing to go in order to achieve his goal.