Dick Cheney is widely acknowledged as the most influential vice president in the nation's history. His tenure as No. 2 represents the culmination of a half-century long transformation of the nation's second highest office.
Remaking what had been an essentially political position -- useful in the campaign but empty after Inauguration Day -- into a central institution of government, Cheney and President George Bush have crafted a new power center in American politics, a reservoir of executive power free not only from congressional oversight and public scrutiny, but also from the Cabinet departments and even the normal workings of the White House.
Late night talk show hosts had a field day with Cheney's recent claims that his office belonged to neither the executive nor the legislative branch. But the vice president seemed to have the last laugh. By insulating his office from political influence -- from accountability of any kind, Cheney has helped create a novel institution in American governance.
Certainly, few of his predecessors could have anticipated Cheney's role. For most of the nation's history, the vice presidency was regarded as a cipher, and many of the office's occupants deserved Johnny Carson's jibe that in America anyone can grow up to be president and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.
John Adams, the first man to hold the office, called the post "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Adams liked to joke about a poor, bereaved mother with two sons. One went off to sea, the other became vice president... and neither was heard from again.
Nearly every one of Adams's successors shared his opinion. Woodrow Wilson's vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, claimed that the vice president "is like a man in a cataleptic state. He cannot speak. He cannot move. He suffers no pain. And yet he is conscious of all that goes on around him."
From the 19th century through the 1960s, the vice presidency mattered only during presidential campaigns, in the brief window between the party nominating conventions and the election in November. Presidential candidates selected running mates to strengthen the ticket outside their home region.
In 1960, for example, Democrat John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon B. Johnson to strengthen his candidacy in Texas and across the South, while Republican Richard M. Nixon selected Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to blunt his rival's strength in the Northeast. Lodge helped Nixon hold normally Republican New Hampshire and Vermont against the New Englander Kennedy, but it was L.B.J.'s ability to deliver Texas that won the narrow election for J.F.K.
Vice presidential nominations could also heal breeches within the parties. The 1880 GOP ticket paired Chester Arthur, a representative of the Republican "Stalwarts" who opposed civil service reform and looked askance on reconciliation with the defeated South, with the "Half-Breed" James Garfield.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan updated this tradition when he named Richard Schweiker as his running mate weeks before the Republican convention. Reagan tapped the liberal Pennsylvania senator in an unsuccessful effort to reach out to moderates in his party and wrest the nomination from the incumbent President Gerald R. Ford.
Since the 1960s, however, the vice presidency has all but lost this political role. While some candidates have selected running mates to make a splash that might generate favorable publicity -- for example, Walter F. Mondale's selection of the first woman nominee to run on a major party ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984, or Al Gore's tapping the first Jew, Joseph Lieberman -- campaigns no longer expect vice presidential candidates to deliver specific regions or constituencies.
Rather than balancing the ticket, presidential nominees often use running mates to reinforce their own message. Bill Clinton, a white Protestant Southern New Democrat chose Gore, another white Protestant Southern New Democrat, in 1992. Certainly, no one today expects the veep to affect the outcome of the general election.
But while the vice presidency has lost its political importance, the office has become steadily more important. Historically, the position had been at nest a ceremonial post, often even less. Vice presidents rarely attended important meetings, saw secret materials, or even entered the White House. Harry Truman, for example, did not learn about the atomic bomb until he became president. For L.B.J., the office was "filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of councils, but in the end it is nothing." He "detested every minute of it."
That began to change during the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter created the modern vice presidency. Carter installed Mondale in the West wing (no previous VP had a White House office), granted him access to classified materials, and met with him privately every week. Clinton and Gore extended this role; the vice president became an influential advisor shaping policies such as the deficit reduction package and the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Gore also directed the president's "reinventing government" initiative and was able to install his own people in key administration positions, like former aide Carol Browner as EPA Director and longtime friend Reed Hundt as FCC Chairman.
Cheney marks the culmination of these trends. Not only did Cheney do little to balance the ticket with George W. Bush, he is the first sitting vice president since 1952 not to seek the presidency after his boss bows out. Immune to political pressure, the vice president works in unprecedented secrecy. He rarely publishes his calendar, destroys his visitor logs, and even refuses to release the size and names of his staff.
Within this insulated bubble, taking advantage of that privileged position, the president has granted Cheney wide authority in matters ranging from treatment of captured terror suspects to energy policy, supreme court nominations to water rights disputes. More than anything else, Cheney has used his position to expand the unchecked authority of the White House, reclaiming some of the perquisites of the imperial presidency that Congress had removed back when a younger Cheney served under President Ford.
Cheney has dramatically completed the transformation of the vice presidency from running mate into surrogate chief of staff. To be sure, it is unlikely that future VPs will not harbor ambitions to seek the presidency in their own right and care so little about public approval (though some presidential candidates might emulate the model of choosing an elder statesman running mate immune to political influence).
But future presidents will likely desire the expanded authority, freedom of movement and the freedom from scrutiny they derive from such a powerful asset. For better or worse, the vice presidency is likely to be a power center for years to come.
In doing so, the Congress of the United States becomes a tacit co-conspirator in this passion-play. By refusing to prosecute the obvious and egregious crimes of a multitude of top officials in all Branches, I believe that the Congress violates the Supreme Law of the Land.
A government that is ostensibly based on the Law, but which refuses to obey the Law, ultimately loses its power to Power, and with that the Republic ends.
I've got a shelf-full of history books to prove it.
Maybe Congress needs to define its oversight rights over the vice presidency more explicitly, but in the end, as another comment pointed out, the Constitution requires people who believe in it and are willing to respect the spirit with which laws are written. If you have a bunch of self-proclaimed revolutionaries whose goal it is to overthrow the old order, then only impeachment will solve the problem.
As DRaymond pointed out in the posting above, the Texas Constitution of 1878 specified that the REAL powers in state government rested with the Lt. Gov., not the Gov.
The Gov. of Texas was, and is, largely ceremonial, kinda like the Queen of England. And, as history has proved, it was a perfect match for George W. -- all he had to do was show up once in a while for photo-ops, and someone else did all the behind-the-scenes dirty work.
A tried-and-true formula which was easily transferable to the national format, only it had to be done without the public's knowlege. Afterall, Americans would be totally outraged to know that someone they never intended to be president (Dick Cheney) would actually wield the powers of the office to which they elected (OK, the Supreme Court elected) someone else, wouldn't they?
Guess what!? It happened, and continues to happen because no one in Congress can believe it and doesn't have a fuckin' clue as to how to reverse it.
How about impeachment? Nah, not from the gutless wonders in Congress.
My vote is for revolution -- ballots or bullets, take your pick. That's what it will eventually come to.
For Cheney is just that. He has not precipitated a constitutional crisis so as much as he is one, from the time he arrogantly and illegally chose himself as a Vice-Presidential candidate through the outcomes of two elections of extremely questionable legality to our present deplorable condition of endless war, unprecedented secrecy in government juxtaposed with unprecedented lack of privacy and destruction of constitutional freedoms for individual citizens, of the recreation of an imperial presidency we thought dead with the resignation of Richard Nixon. Cheney, a far stronger force than his supposed boss, the stumbling, bumbling, intellectually incurious son of privilege, George Bush, has presided over the near destruction of the constitution with the radical restructuring of power in Washington using the unethical skills of Karl Rove to trivialize democratic institutions and turn them into political arms of the White House. The man appears to be mentally unbalanced and obsessed with power to the exclusion of respect for and understanding of constitutional government.
Whether it is possible to undo some of the damage done by Dick Cheney is yet to be seen. It would take a strong,intelligent and aware president and an ethical and responsible, not to mention mentally balanced vice president, a strong legislative branch and a judicial branch composed of qualified and reasonably uncorruptible justices. It will also take an intelligent, educated and sophisticated electorate.
Alot to hope for, but what a democracy needs to survive. For there is no democracy without balance of power between the branches of government. And certainly the office of vice president cannot function as the power center in a democracy. It is not just a matter of the vice presidency evolving to a certain state. It has been recreated and in that recreation it is a clear and present danger to our democratic republic.
So that's one theory: Richard B. Cheney is a warped, evil man and therein lies all the trouble. We might have suspected the shadiness of Cheney's character early on, when he flouted the Constitution's requirement that the VP must hail from a different state than the President. When Cheney picked himself as the Texas Governor's running mate, he had been living in Texas for years, himself, running Halliburton.
An alternative theory, of course, is that the Framers' recipe was flawed to start with. Actually, their _very_ first attempt was such a disaster, they retooled it immediately: the Vice President was originally the runner-up in the Electoral College. So it's not anathema to suggest that the Framers failed to get it quite right on their second try as well. They took it for granted that the ultimate check on a VP would be the man's own electoral ambition: naked powergrabs and transparent lies, they assumed, would scotch his aspiration to be elected POTUS in his own right. Little did they count on a VP whose goal was to transform America _without_ the fuss and bother of getting himself elected to the Oval Office.
By the way, please note that the 22nd Amendment does not forbid a person to be elected more than twice as _Vice_ President. Cheney's plan, I bet, is to get himself appointed to head up Giuliani's or Romney's VP search committee, and reluctantly conclude that the best candidate is ... Dick Cheney. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-- TP
Like everything Bush/Cheney and the Neo-cons have done this will blow up in their faces.