DARN! Now we have to dump those awesome, new schematic drawings showing five branches of government and we can’t run that backlog of sarcastic Cagle Cartoons. The Politico:
Dick Cheney’s office is abandoning a justification for keeping the vice president’s secret papers out of the hands of the National Archives, while asserting a new argument for withholding them.
Officials working for Cheney had tried to claim he is separate from the executive branch, but they will no longer pursue that defense, senior administration officials tell The Politico.
The decision follows a threat by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the No. 3 House Democrat, to try to cut off the office’s $4.8 million in executive-branch funding, and a letter from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) asking for the reasoning behind the argument.
According to the Politico, it was Cheney’s lawyers — not the Veep — that decided to abandon legalistic ship on this one:
At issue was an executive order giving the National Archives oversight over the government’s handling of classified information.
David S. Addington, Cheney’s chief of staff and counsel, wrote in a three-paragraph response to Kerry on Tuesday that the executive order on classified national security information does not give the archivists authority over the president or vice president.
Addington said that therefore it “is not necessary in these circumstances to address the subject of any alternative reasoning.”
That amounted to throwing in the towel on the claim that the vice president is distinct from the executive branch, according to administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity, and the White House has no plans to reassert the argument.
Kerry posted Addington’s response on his Senate website, calling the letter “legalistic” and a continued attempt to “duck and dodge on agency scrutiny, classified documents.”
Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.
White House spokespeople have been struggling to answer questions about the argument without repeating, amplifying or embracing it.
Not quite. There were news stories indicating the White House had backed Cheney on his contention. Prediction: when the claim there is a Cheney Branch of government is examined more thoroughly by historian’s, they’ll likely conclude that this was a case of Cheny AND the White House suffering a severe bout of legalistic foot-in-mouth disease.
Why the change?
Most likely because the reaction from the news media, most likely from political types and probably from traditional conservatives who are descendents of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan made the lawyers decide the argument was opening political, legalistic and — if Emanual had his way — budgetary cans of worms.
And/or: perhaps the White House had polls indicating Cheney’s approval ratings had gone so far south that they could spot polar bears and penguins.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.