Slate
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president’s insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney’s multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.
History will express bemusement at the fact that the vice president was able to usurp so much power so surreptitiously. But only in the first chapter. They are going to use the rest of the book expressing wild-eye bafflement that the congres allowed him and the president to do what he did and were only moved to impeach him, kicking and screaming, for crimes that so far outweigh what the previous president had been impeached for that they will have no other option than to conclude that almost the entire population of both houses were complicit in the act.
Plus, this is a very convenient marker for the end of America as a super power and it can be counted as the decline of the Western hemisphere [although what the Indians and Chinese are making of the new world order isn’t very inspirational, if I may be so bold.]