Dick Cheney - greasing the skids for corporate America

The Washington Post is spending a significant amount of time investigating Dick Cheney's role as Vice President. Their latest story looks at his activity in navigating and bending the bureaucracy to the will of the President, riding roughshod over environmental regulations and other popularly supported legal measures.

It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure...It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.

Of course, this is nothing compared to his latest attempt to avoid government disclosure rules by arguing that the Vice President is not part of the executive branch.

Not everyone is accepting Cheney's latter statement sitting down. Congressman Rahm Emanuel promptly introduced an amendment to a funding bill to strip executive branch funds for Cheney's office. He also released the following chart and statement illustrating Cheney's understanding of the branches of government:

"Today, we discovered that everything we learned in U.S. government class was wrong. Evidently, the Vice President does not consider himself a part of the executive branch, and therefore believes he can obstruct meaningful oversight and avoid being held accountable. If the Vice President truly believes he is not a part of the executive branch, he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill."

Snap!