[Cicero]

What's the point? That Cheney should have ignored the constitution, helped give Nicaragua to the Communist Sandinistas, and cooperated with al Qaeda?

[Numbers Guy]

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?

[Finalapproach29er]

Democrats are always on the side of America's enemies.

[Revolutionary]

The money came primarily from fund raisers. Ollie North used to do a lot of evening fund raisers with good Americans that wanted to stop the communists. They also sold some non-U.S. owned (pretty sure on this one (I think they were Israeli)) Hawk missiles to Iran in exchange for an American prisoner that Hezbolla (pretty sure) was holding in Lebanon. This did two things: help return the Iran-Iraq war back to a stalemate and provided funds not provided by the the budget with which to help the Contras.

Basically, what it was all about is that Reagan, Ollie, etc. found a legal way around the evil intentions of the Democrats and they were pissed. They trumpeted the arms sale to Iran because it sounded bad on its face and Reagan couldn't openly say that we were helping both sides of the Iran-Iraq war just enough to keep it a stalemate.

Another piece of the puzzle was the highly classified Presidential finding that Ollie was working under. The Democrats were trying to squeeze Ollie so hard that he would give up the information on the finding to save his skin. Like a good Marine, he absorbed the bullets and kept on fighting. That really pissed the Dems off. They also thought they could squeeze Ollie's secretary, but they found out that she was several times smarter than they were and a hotty that played very well on T.V.