America Letter:While the Senate was killing off comprehensive immigration reform this week, the House of Representatives was debating a proposal to cut off funding for Dick Cheney's office, home, transport and entertainment expenses.
The move, which was defeated by 217 votes to 202, was a response to the vice-president's assertion last week that he did not have to comply with federal rules on filing classified documents because, as president of the Senate, he is not actually part of the executive branch of government.
The claim, which Cheney's office has edged away from this week, was all the more startling given that the vice-president has in the past used executive privilege as an argument for keeping secrets.
Congressman Rahm Emmanuel told the House that, if Cheney is not part of the executive branch, then the spending bill funding that branch need not bother with his office. "There have been 46 vice-presidents in US history, and not one of them knew this or ever claimed this position. Perhaps the vice-president thought he occupied an undisclosed branch of government," Emmanuel said.
Cheney is not only the most powerful vice-president in US history, he is also the most secretive, as a remarkable series in the Washington Post demonstrated this week. Based on more than a year's research, the reports document how the vice-president has used secrecy to outmanoeuvre cabinet colleagues and White House bureaucracy in order to shape decisions before they reach President George Bush.
After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, Cheney bypassed other senior officials, including Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, to push the president into a series of controversial decisions on how captured foreign fighters and terrorist suspects should be treated.
The vice-president's lawyer was instrumental in drafting a secret legal opinion that approved as lawful a list of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. The opinion, which Rice and former secretary of state Colin Powell heard about only two years later, drew the line against one method the CIA had proposed: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.
Cheney fought to prevent the US public from learning how often he consulted the oil and natural gas industry over energy policy; he told the secret service to destroy visitor logbooks at his official residence; and he still refuses to disclose the names or size of his staff.
Cheney's secretiveness has contributed to his image as a somewhat sinister, immensely powerful figure who many on the left believe makes all the important decisions in the White House. An acquaintance of the vice-president told me this week that friends react with disbelief whenever he mentions a social encounter with Cheney.
"It's as if I told them I just had dinner with Mussolini," he said.
The vice-president is next in succession to become president, should there be a vacancy or should the president suffer from mental or physical inability to serve. He is also the president of the Senate, although he cannot take part in debate and he can vote only to break a tie.
Beyond that, the vice-president's role is essentially whatever the president decides it is. Cheney has used his experience as Gerald Ford's chief of staff to outwit the White House bureaucracy and gain extraordinary influence over Bush in an array of policy areas, from national security to energy and the economy.
The Democratic Congress has clearly had enough of Cheney's secretive ways, however, and Senate judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy this week signed subpoenas requiring the president and the vice-president to hand over documents relating to a programme to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant. The White House dismissed the request as "outrageous" and Mr Bush has already rejected subpoenas for material concerning the controversial firing of nine federal prosecutors last year.
Congress could seek to prosecute the White House for contempt and even arrest officials for refusing to hand over documents or testify, but neither the House nor the Senate has taken such a step for more than 70 years.
"The president's response to our subpoena shows an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government," said House judiciary chairman John Conyers.
But as Cheney continues to feed documents into the shredder or lock them in the man-sized safes in his office, there may be little that Congress can do beyond lamenting the vice-president's mysterious ways.
