Posted on 11/26/2006 12:37:22 PM PST by RWR8189
ANN ARBOR, MICH. -- In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.
President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.
"I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff," Cheney said.
Most of Cheney's colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of "disdain for the law."
Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power."
The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power -- nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president's hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast "inherent" powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.
Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration's hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
What's the point? That Cheney should have ignored the constitution, helped give Nicaragua to the Communist Sandinistas, and cooperated with al Qaeda?
The author clearly does not understand that the Boland Amendment was budgetary boilerplate. It had the force of law as a condition upon the expenditure of appropriations. It had no standing as far as criminal law or anything else. If violated, the remedy would have been for a lawsuit to be filed to require that the money in question (funding for the White House) be spent properly.
Cheney's argument was that the condition could not apply to money that was not appropriated by Congress. That's not a power grab, it's a logical conclusion from the fact that it was a condition on money budgeted by Congress, and Iran-Contra involved money NOT budgeted by Congress.
The other argument by the Democrats at the time was that the language barred Contra-support activities by paid NSC staff, but even that's an iffy argument, as what constitutes paid activities as opposed to unpaid activities?
Democrats are always on the side of America's enemies.
...against America in every way, shape, and form.
A mint.
They got the House and Senate now it's time to go after the White House.
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