The Vice President and the President have casually declared their offices to be independent of the executive branch and completely autonomous, with Dick Cheney also attempting to abolish agencies his office is supposed to be accountable to.
Last week the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported:
Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”
As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.
In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes: "I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. ... [I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials."
The documents released by the committee reveal that Cheney's office has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration which is responsible for overseeing the protection of classified material by the executive branch.
As the Washington Post further reported, Cheney's staff have consistently declared themselves above the law by not filing reports on their possession of classified data and even blocking an inspection of their office in 2004. The documents also reveal that after the Archives office demanded cooperation earlier this year, Cheney's staff proposed eliminating it altogether.
While Cheney has declared his office outside of the executive branch he has continued to receive funding from the bill that funds the executive branch. Instead of challenging Cheney's absurd declaration of autonomy, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel is now seeking an amendment to the Financial Services and General
Government Appropriations bill in order to cut the funding to Cheney's office and thus legally separate it from the executive branch.
"The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal
case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive
branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot
ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President
should be consistent." Emanuel has said.
In addition to Cheney's office declaring itself exempt from oversight, President Bush's office has also claimed it has the same status.
The LA Times reported:
An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.
It has now become chillingly clear that the President and the Vice President believe that they have absolute power over the Government of the United States and cannot be held accountable to anybody.
Previously Dick Cheney has declared both himself and Bush unaccountable to Congress, stating last year that "vice president and president and constitutional officers don’t appear before the Congress.”
It is also now clear that Bush and Cheney have broken literally hundreds of laws because they see themselves as outside of them. Last April the Boston Globe reported:
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
The Constitution assigns power to Congress to write the laws and asserts that the president has an obligation ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Take the "torture ban", which was approved last year, for example. After approving the bill, Bush issued a ''signing statement" giving his own interpretation of what the law meant and giving him the right to bypass it if he so wished.
Bush and Cheney are vastly expanding Presidential power and creating provisions that set their offices up as dictatorial bodies.
Answers:
Are they above the law? Of course not.
They are temporary occupants of their offices who, sadly, have done more damage to the laws and Constitution of this country than any terrorist group could ever hope to do. They are mean-spirited, insensitive people who have attempted to establish themselves as imperial monarchs by ignoring the clear precedents and traditions that have made us great. They have severely damaged our democratic principles and have violated any number of laws along the way.
I would add a list of their offenses here but would probably run out of room. It will take us decades to re-establish our adherance to the law and Constitution, not to mention to restore our standing in the international community. They have promoted intolerance, torture. secret dealings (e.g., oil companies involvement in the energy task force, which Cheney stonewalls to this day), and have invaded another country which was no threat to us whatsoever.
They lie consistently and have divided our country more than ever since the civil war. Their offenses are shocking, as is their arrogance.
The good news is that they will all be gone soon, but I, for one, would like them to stay around just a little longer to face charges, trials and convictions. One of their mindless supporters on here recently asked, "Since when is protecting our country a violation of the Constitution?" The answer is that the ends do not justify the means, and in any event, they are not "protecting" our country but, rather, endangering it by ignoring our Constitution and laws.
Next to this crowd, Richard Nixon looks like a saint.
No they are not above the law. Nor is any politician. But they all think they are. And not just these pols but throughout history. Now they tap people phones whicj is wrong. But what about FDR just rounding up a whole race of people and putting them in a concentration camp. Or the Congress and Presidents with their phony bookkeeping systems. They claim the debt is nearly 9 trillion dollars when in actuality its 56 trillion. Since they protect themselves and each other they get away with it. If it were up to me they all would be in concentration camps.
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