Cheney Says UncleApparently that letter from David Addingtion to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) yesterday really did constitute a wholesale retreat from the “fourth branch” argument. No more will you hear Cheney’s lawyers claim that the vice president isn’t in the executive branch, reports Mike Allen at The Politico:
The White House has no plans to reassert the argument there is any vice presidential distinction from the executive branch, the officials said.Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.
But as Addington made clear in his letter this morning (by a transparently weak argument), that doesn’t mean that the vice president will submit to review by the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office. So the game’s still on. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is still planning a vote late today or tomorrow on cutting off the VP’s office $4.8 million in executive-branch funding. We’ll keep you updated as that approaches.
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