The debate continues over the role of Vice President Dick Cheney — a Vice President who has weilded power unlike any other.

But the more press reports come out, the more the question becomes: has he been a surrogate presidential Chief of Staff, reflecting his boss’s wishes? Or has he become a kind of political Lone Ranger — riding off alone on his horse with President George Bush as Tonto (with Bush’s critics likely agreeing with the Spanish meaning of that name)?

A new series beginning starting in today’s Washington Post explores Cheney’s quiet but pervasive influence on the Bush administration and a wide variety of policies. Its first installment is an eye opener. The scene setting paragraph:

. ..”Angler,” as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

But the key moment that indicated what Cheney was about involved former Veep Dan Quayle:

In his Park Avenue corner suite at Cerberus Global Investments, Dan Quayle recalled the moment he learned how much his old job had changed. Cheney had just taken the oath of office, and Quayle paid a visit to offer advice from one vice president to another.

“I said, ‘Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising . . . you’ll be going to the funerals,’ ” Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, ‘We’ve all done it.’ ”

Cheney “got that little smile,” Quayle said, and replied, “I have a different understanding with the president.”

“He had the understanding with President Bush that he would be — I’m just going to use the word ’surrogate chief of staff,’ ” said Quayle, whose membership on the Defense Policy Board gave him regular occasion to see Cheney privately over the following four years.

What’s troubling now is that in the recent controversy in which Cheney has virtually declared himself a separate branch of govenrment we see yet ANOTHER indication that Cheney is pushing the envelope…and is likely to get away with it. The Post series shows it’s part of an extensive pattern.

Andrew Sullivan warns that Cheney is an “extremely dangerous man” and writes on his blog about the new controversy where Cheney insists he is not part of the executive branch:

I don’t think this is a trivial matter, because it seems to me that Cheney is currently an extremely dangerous man. He has nothing to lose in the next eighteen months. He cannot get any less popular. He thinks the 2004 election is the only legitimacy he needs. He doesn’t believe the Congress should have any role in foreign policy. And he also believes that Iran must not develop nuclear power and that no one apart from him can stop them. The drum beat coming from his office about Iran’s direct involvement in the Iraq war is obviously a preamble to claiming that the 2003 war authorization gives him and Bush the right to bomb Iran without going back to the Congress for approval. He’s a man ready and willing to pull a Cambodia. If the Congress and the press don’t start pushing back now, it may come sooner rather than later.

And, indeed, what’s different in this period in American history is that Americans are now witnessing a top elected public official in effect say that he is above Congress, above meaningful independent oversight, above the electorate, above political opinion polls, above the press, answerable only to his own President — yet somehow not part of the President’s branch.

What’s different, too, is that in previous periods of American history there were stalwart patriots who felt their prime duty on earth was to defend the constitution as written and to maintain existing norms and vital legitimacy-conferring consensus about how government in the United States operated.

Today, many want to go along with Cheney because he’s their guy, who is on their team and you always defend members of your own team, even if you would turn red and scream if someone on the other team did the same thing.

Perhaps as time goes on some who now are doing highly imaginative ideological summersaults to defend Cheney will adjust their perceptions and conclude that the bigger, champion team Americans of both parties and no party are on was comprised of the folks who drafted the constitution during a sweaty summer in Philadelphia long ago and decided that all team members should be held accountable — and that no team members would be exempt from penalties if they violated the rules of the game.

Even The Lone Ranger believed in that.

See our earlier posts on Cheney here and here.