Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview on Fox, exchanged some heavy fire with Vice President elect Joseph Biden, mocking Biden’s ideas on the role of the Vice President and defending his own view of the expansive powers of the Presidency during wartime. From the Washington Post:
Cheney, offering no regrets or apologies for his aggressive role in guiding national security policies over the past eight years, openly mocked Biden for citing the wrong part of the Constitution during a campaign debate and for pledging to pursue a less expansive agenda than Cheney has.
“If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and, apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”
In an interview on ABC’s “This Week” Biden said he would work to restore a “balance” to the Vice Presidency.
Biden said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that Cheney was “dead wrong” in his views about unfettered presidential powers during wartime and that the approach “has been not healthy for our foreign policy, not healthy for our national security, and it has not been consistent with our Constitution.” He said he intended to “restore the balance” in power between the presidency and the vice presidency.
I assume that Biden’s reference to “balance” infers that he believes the President should have some say in policy. That would have to be considered an area of strong disagreement with Cheney.
Cheney did express one area of disagreement with Bush, over the removal of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.
With less than a month left in office, Cheney was blunt and unapologetic about his central role in some of the most controversial issues of the past eight years, including the invasion of Iraq, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and harsh interrogation tactics. Cheney acknowledged that he had disagreed with Bush’s decision to remove embattled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in late 2006, saying that “the president doesn’t always take my advice.” “I was a Rumsfeld man,” Cheney said. “I’d helped recruit him, and I thought he did a good job for us.”
Cheney and Rumsfeld go way back together, all the way to the Nixon-Ford years. Cheney certainly is a Rumsfeld man, and that should tell us all we need to know about why our efforts in Iraq were essentially run into the ground.
Biden did also criticize Cheney’s view that in wartime the President accrues vast power to act in ways that some might consider unlawful.
In his ABC interview, which was taped ahead of broadcast yesterday, Biden said Cheney was “mistaken” in his view of “a unitary executive, meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power goes to the executive.” Biden said the view served “at a minimum to weaken our standing in the world and weaken our security. I stand by that judgment.”
Cheney’s views seem to mirror, in some fashion, those of President Richard Nixon, who said “if the President does it it is not illegal”. Republican Dicks span the decades, but some things never change.
Bill Manzi.com 