These differences of opinion and disagreement over Constitutional issues between John Kerry and Dick Cheney were in the news a lot again this past week. The Vice President's unprecedented attempts to evade being called to account for the actions of his office by claiming exemption from executive orders issued by his own President on the grounds that his office is not actually part of the executive branch caused quite a bit of stir in the mainstream media and in the political blogosphere, especially in light of the many occasions on which he has also attempted to evade being called to account for the actions of his office by claiming executive privilege instead.
And the Senator's response to the Vice President's attempts to dodge accountability for his own actions was both prompt and pointed. As this press release from JK's office noted earlier in the week,
Washington D.C. -- Sen. John Kerry today wrote to David Addington, the Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, asking for details about why Cheney believes that he is not subject to agency scrutiny. Addington recently claimed that Cheney does not consider himself part of the executive branch of government, according to National Archives officials.
"It comes as no surprise that the ‘imperial president’ and his vice president are once again trying to dodge scrutiny with a ridiculous claim that Dick Cheney is not part of the executive branch of government," Kerry said. "This is an unprecedented break with hundreds of years of history, and undermines the integrity of executive power and the Executive Order as an institution."
Addington replied to JK's letter, JK then replied to Addington's reply, and the ensuing exchange was closely followed by progressive bloggers (a few typical examples being these threads from Daily Kos, TPMuckraker, Democratic Underground, and Balkinization, among many others.)
But not all news is new news. Some of it is old news. And the Washington Post has been digging up plenty of old news in its exhaustive examinationof Vice President Cheney's unparalleled attempts to create a parallel shadow governmental branch outside the confines of the U.S. Constitution. As the WaPo noted in its intro to the 4th installment of its Cheney series,
Dick Cheney steered some of the Bush administration's most important environmental decisions -- easing air pollution controls, opening public parks to snowmobiles and diverting river water from threatened salmon.
And as WaPo reporters Jo Becker and Barton Gellman went on to say in the article they titled "Leaving No Tracks,"
Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.
"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge's desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.
First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.
The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.
By combining unwavering ideological positions -- such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish -- with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration's approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.
The vice president also pushed to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the nation's repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House's decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.
These egregious examples of Bush Administration officials riding roughshod over environmental regulations did not go unnoticed at the time, though they certainly didn't get the attention they deserved at a time when the invasion and occupation of Iraq was in the forefront of most peoples' minds. (It's interesting to note in hindsight that most contemporary accounts of these events pointed the finger at Karl Rove rather than Dick Cheney, since at that point Rove was much more successful at serving as a handy stand-in straw man for Cheney than seems to be the case today.)
JK made his views known quite clearly in this press release and letterdated 09/05/2003:
In response to a request by Senator John Kerry that it investigate whether the Bush Administration exerted political influence over its management of the Klamath River Basin, the Inspector General of the Department of Interior has announced that it has launched an investigation into the matter.
"The Bush Administration has acted as if federal agencies like the Interior Department are a division of the Republican National Committee and at their disposal to give out political favors. The Klamath decision was but one more example of politics dictating policy in the Bush Administration," said Kerry. "The Klamath decision should have been based on law and science and not a political operative’s agenda, polls, and campaign priorities."
In the ensuing years Vice-President Cheney's pronounced predilections for making high-level executive decisions based on his personal political operative's agenda have become very well known. As the WaPo article brought to the fore again, Cheney and Rove's deliberate diversion of scarce Klamath River resources to corporate farms at the expense of wildlife and individuals who care about the environment they live in was hardly atypical.
An arrogant disregard for life, laws, and liberty would seem to have become a publicly-held hallmark of this administration in its waning years.
So this weekend's updates on the years-old Klamath River fish kill crisis don't seem to be either outdated or inappropriate, as indicated by this blog entry from Loaded Orygun:
The Klamath water controversy that flared in 2001 and 2002 and goes on to this day has become something of a national story, most vividly wrapped inside a devastatingly precise indictment of Dick Cheney's term as Vice President. Jason Leopold's story that we looked over on Monday reminded everyone of Karl Rove's intervention and subsequent airy clearing of wrongdoing by the Interior IG (fedora doff to Bill at P3, noble work). Now Darlene Hooley has asked for an investigation into Cheney's role.
And also by this one from The Next Hurrah:
In other words, the DOI did an investigation of this process, apparently didn't question the folks like Barry Jackson and Dick Cheney who appear to have been involved, and concluded this was all normal.
I'm guessing Waxman's committee is interested because this is an example of a prior PowerPoint where Rove appears to have used department resources for political gain, similar to the famous GSA PowerPoint earlier this year. But I'm just as interested whether -- by revising the scope of this back to Cheney's early involvement, the IG might come to a different conclusion about the political influence behind this decision.
What happened to the wildlife and the individual residents of the Klamath River Basin in the early years of the Cheney/Bush administration is completely outrageous from an environmental standpoint.
Then as now, the evidence indicates that arrogant and easily-bought operatives of a would-be imperial executive branch continue to think they can ride roughshod over the very land and its inhabitants that their oaths of office require them to be wise stewards of.
John Kerry has no intention of letting them get away with that kind of un-Constitutional excess. And he knows that you won't, either.