BLITZER: Mr. Mondale, about Dick Cheney. You have been critical of him, the relationship he has had with the president. Contrast that to the relationship you had when you were vice president with President Carter.
MONDALE: This vice president, the current vice president, seems to have stepped across a line that we thought was important in our time. I tried to work as a representative of the president. I didn't go around volunteering my own policies. I considered myself that kind of office holder and not a prime minister, not a deputy president or something like that.
This vice presidency is troubling to me because time and time again, we've seen the establishment, for example, of almost a parallel National Security Council, the involvement of the vice president in trying to pressure, influence the kind of information that flows to the top and up to the presidency.
And I think that political scientists ought to study about whether there should be a recognized line that a vice president must obey to prevent that kind of problem that we're seeing today. Many of the things we've been told that has helped get us in trouble here I think is a reflection of that problem.
That perspective was echoed in a Washington Post column by David Ignatius on Friday:
After six years, it remains one of Washington's enduring mysteries: How does Vice President Cheney shape decisions in the tight inner circle of the Bush administration? There's a sense that Cheney's influence is on the rise again, at least with Iraq policy, but that's after many months in which his allies say his role was diminished.
To outside observers, Cheney has been the political equivalent of a black hole -- exerting a powerful but mostly invisible force on decisions. The office of the vice president has had a gravitational weight that sucked in other personalities and entire branches of the government without emitting light or heat that would explain the decision-making process.
This statement is particularly telling:
"What has defined the OVP since Scooter [Libby] left is listlessness," says one Cheney ally. "For 18 months, it was defined by its torpidity. That was deeply distressing" to Cheney's conservative supporters, who feared that Bush had become captive to overly cautious advice from his senior military commanders, Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey.
Bush, who has always insisted that he listens to his generals on the ground in order to gauge the situation in Iraq (although that is debatable), was seen straying from the influence of Cheney's apparently more reliable guidance during a time of war.
Many have of course concluded that Cheney is the president by proxy and that Bush is simply following orders. Mondale's criticism clearly shows that 'line' which has been crossed by the Bush administration's advancement of the unitary executive theory which has caused major controversies such as the legal row over domestic spying authorized by Bush while bypassing the accepted FISA court procedures.
With a Democratic congress now in a position to fight back to restore what ought to be the balance of powers via the use of hearings and investigations, the unitary executive policies will be scrutinized and hopefully checked just as we saw when the administration relented to actually getting proper warrants* via FISA for their so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program this past week.
Reigning in Cheney however will most likely prove to be a far greater challenge since no one's really sure exactly how much power he exerts behind the scenes. In the meantime, one thing most people agree on is that his influence is far greater than perhaps any vice president in US history and, as Mondale reminds us, that ought to be a cause for great concern along with an examination of what powers a VP ought to have.
* The public is still in the dark when it comes to knowing what is contained in the so-called orders from the FISA court regarding the administration's need to obtain warrants.
h/t for the Slate article to the Infowarrior mailing list.
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