February 11, 2002
Cheney Should Stop Stalling
By JOHN W. DEAN
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.
Vice President Dick Cheney's posturing about his energy task force has a familiar ring to someone who served in the Nixon White House. It is the sound of someone who has something to hide.
It was during Watergate that I first came to appreciate the power of the General Accounting Office over the executive branch. H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, called me to say that the accounting office wanted to examine the White House's books and records. The president didn't want them sniffing around. How could we stop them?
The short answer was we couldn't stop them ‹ we could only delay them. And that is precisely what Mr. Cheney is attempting to do with his misguided efforts to prevent the accounting office from seeing some records pertaining to the meetings of his energy task force.
Mr. Cheney says he is refusing to provide the requested information as a matter of principle. But as a matter of law, it is clear that the General Accounting Office has a right to the information.
Some three decades ago, I convinced Mr. Haldeman that the office's auditors were not partisans looking for dirt. And the president relented when I explained that to litigate the G.A.O.'s authority would bring only negative publicity and defeat. The audit proceeded, and nothing whatsoever came of it.
Mr. Cheney has spent enough years on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch to know that the G.A.O.'s auditors and examiners play it straight, and that David M. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, is no exception. And that's why his snub of the accounting office's request for limited information about the work of his energy task force is surprising. He has said he wants to "protect the ability of the president and the vice president to get unvarnished advice from any source we want."
The accounting office, however, has not asked that he disclose the "unvarnished advice" ‹ only the names of those who provided it. The vice president has already revealed he, or members of his staff, met on at least five occasions with Enron officials.
Yet rather than give out any more names, the vice president has challenged the accounting office's authority to request this information. Thus the G.A.O. must sue to resolve the question.
If the vice president does not believe, as a matter of principle, that the General Accounting Office should have oversight power, he should try to sell Congress on changing the statute that empowers it. That he has not done, perhaps because he knows such an effort would be futile.
Richard Nixon was most vocal about maintaining this or that principle of executive authority when he had the most to hide. I cannot but wonder what truly motivates Mr. Cheney's newfound interest in litigating principles of executive versus legislative authority. On the surface it appears he has decided he is better off taking the political fallout from resisting the accounting office's request than he would be if he disclosed the information.
I can only speculate as to why he is stonewalling. But I don't need to speculate about the effect of his stonewalling. It places the vice president, knowingly or not, in cover-up mode.
In fact, much of the Watergate cover-up was simply stalling. The goal was to push any potential problem beyond the 1972 election, and in that we succeeded. Later Mr. Nixon would try to stall until he completed his presidency, but he failed.
The Bush administration's stalling strategy appears to be very simple: Delay disclosing the requested information by contesting the accounting office's authority. It will take months, if not years, for that lawsuit to work its way through the lower federal courts before it can ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court. Then, after losing in the Supreme Court, the administration can still delay release of the information by mounting another fight over executive privilege ‹ which the president has not yet invoked. All this litigation will certainly get the administration safely past the 2004 election.
Of course, there is another possibility. Mr. Cheney may believe that the five conservative justices who put him in his current job will again assist the administration.
Such a remarkable political win in the Supreme Court, effectively neutering the oversight authority of the accounting office ‹ and, by extension, that of Congress ‹ would amount to a seismic realignment of power in Washington. Before Bush v. Gore, I would have considered such a ruling an impossibility. Now I am not so sure.
John W. Dean served as White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 and is author, most recently, of ``The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court.''
--
"Beware of the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the
citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double edged
sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind."
"And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils
with hate and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the
rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry infused with fear and blinded
by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and do it
gladly so."
"How do I know? I know for this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
Julius Caesar
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