James Taranto, the editor of OpinionJournal.com,
interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney on the editorial page of yesterday's
Wall Street Journal.
Cheney's views on executive power--which he certainly wasn't shy about expressing--provide yet another reason why Samuel (Unitary Executive) Alito should be kept off the Supreme Court.
One Cheney quote confirmed what I've believed for a long time--namely, that Cheney and Rumsfeld are settling old scores from the Watergate era. More than 30 years later, they're still bent on restoring the imperial presidency that Richard Nixon dreamed of. As the vice president told Taranto:
"In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate... there was a concerted effort to place limits and restrictions on presidential authority--everything from the War Powers Act to the Hughes-Ryan Act on intelligence to stripping the president of his ability to impound funds--a series of decisions that were aimed at the time at trying to avoid a repeat of things like Vietnam or...Watergate.
"I thought they were misguided then, and have believed that given the world that we live in, that the president needs to have unimpaired executive authority.
In other words, a king. Ironically, a king named George.
Cheney also repeats a pet administration talking point in this quote about the president's right to conduct warrantless surveillance:
"The combination of the president's constitutional authority under Article II as commander in chief, the resolution Congress passed after 9/11 [authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda], as well as the historical precedent that all presidents have claimed in terms of their authority with respect to intercepting enemy communications" all establish "ample justification for the NSA program."
That is simply not true. In his op-ed in the December 23, 2005, Washington Post, then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle wrote:
Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas--where we all understood he wanted authority to act--but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.
Daschle's words are probably irrelevant to Cheney, who suggested to Taranto that the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act and, for that matter, the War Powers Resolutions, are unconstitutional restraints on presidential power and could be ignored if necessary.
Cheney repeats another administration talking point about the scope of National Security Agency surveillance:
"This notion [is] peddled out there by some that this is, quote, 'domestic surveillance' or 'domestic spying.' No, it's not. It is the interception of communications, one end of which is outside the United States, and one end of which, either outside the U.S. or inside, we have reason to believe is al-Qaeda-connected. Those are two pretty clear requirements, both of which need to be met."
So if the surveillance is limited to those believed to be connected to al-Queda, it falls squarely within the FISA statute and getting a warrant to conduct wouldn't have been a problem. Why then didn't the administration ask for a warrant? Either (a) it's lying about the scope of surveillance or (b) is out to pick a fight over presidential authority. Or perhaps, both (a) and (b).
It gets worse. In so many words, Cheney threatened an investigation of the New York Times over its leaking of the NSA surveillance story:
]The leak did] serious damage to the national security of the United States....If somebody has been responsible for divulging information that damages national security, then appropriate action ought to be taken."
Evidently, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers are also on Cheney's list of ancient scores to be settled.
One more thing. The vice president also considers the Republican-led Congress a security risk. Asked why the administration hasn't asked Congress to fix the FISA statute, which Cheney described as obsolete, he said:
"I can't be any more precise than that without getting into details of the program....I don't want to get into operational details."
Taranto didn't ask Cheney what he thought of the Alito nomination. Given his comments about the reach of executive power, it was hardly necessary to do so.