Well, the VP can serve as acting president when the president is incapacitated – that’s provided in the 25th Amendment – but otherwise, there is no constitutional provision for the VP serving in the president’s stead. His powers are very limited.
The VP’s specific powers enumerated in the Constitution are very limited. But Bush has delegated to him a considerable amount of power. All that power is Executive power, and doesn’t rest at all on his role as President of the Senate. It’s hard to see how anything pertaining to Cheney’s exercise of that power wouldn’t be subject to laws and Executive orders covering the entire Executive Branch.
Bush could have just as easily picked another Veep, and made Cheney his chief of staff, to the same effect. The only difference, really, is that the Veep can’t be fired by the President in mid-term, only impeached by Congress.
Mustn’t forget that tie-breaking vote in the Senate, which usually doesn’t mean much, but in interesting times, such as these…
If only. Has there ever been a credible rundown of who had been short-listed for the VP spot before Cheney decided he was the best man for the job?
Obviously, the solution is for Congress to pass a metric boatload of laws that begin with, “The Constitutional Office of the Vice-President of the United States is subject to…”
Part two: “Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power”.
Part three: “A Strong Push from Backstage”.
The concluding installment, tomorrow, will be about Cheney’s influence on the Admin’s environmental policies. (Regarding which, see this thread.)
In a clip from July 25, 2001 played on the Daily Show, Cheney said:
It seems to me that at that time, being in the executive branch suited him just fine.
Well, sure, *at that time * he was part of the executive! But the VP’s Office is flexible to a marvelous extent, which displays, once again, the genius of the Founding Fathers in creating a highly malleable branch of governance, once that can adapt instantly to conditions as they arise.
For example, when Cheney had the misfortune to shoot a lawyer out of season, he determined, on the spot, that he was not subject to the vexations of the Texas Highway Patrol. In this instance, he adopted his capacity in the judicial branch (dunno, maybe he keeps a set of robes and a gavel in his luggage…). In his judicial capacity, he made the determination that was needful under the circumstances.
Some priceless excerpts from yesterday’s White House press briefing:
Maybe it’s time for a new request to see the energy task force minutes, now that Cheney’s made it clear that he regards as moot the original legal justification for keeping them secret. 
Truth is, Cheney could not possibly care less about the whole mess. He knows that the Congress has neither the will nor the time nor the votes to impeach and convict him, so he’s going to thumb his nose at everybody and run the clock out. Perhaps as a result of this we’ll go back to the Agnew type veep (totally uninvolved) as opposed to the Cheney type.
I was wondering about that. Does this mean we can finally get access to those records, since Cheney is no longer claiming executive privilege?
Daniel
See any pig flop dropping from the sky?
Stephen Colbert’s take on this was brilliant… he was talking about checks and balances, and how the three branches of government are like rock, paper and scissors. So then he gets one of his staffers over, and says “want to play a game of Rock Paper Scissors Cheney”?
So they go “one two three…”, and the staffer holds out scissors, and Stephen puts his hand under his desk (where we can’t see it), and says “OK, I beat you”. And the staffer says “what do you have?”, and Stephen says “I can’t tell you”.
Deleted as a duplicate.
Won’t work. There is a Supreme Court decision that says he doesn’t have to.
I’ll say again that the constitution has been shown to contain a few weaknesses. They are a result of the framers assumption that those elected to run the country would have at least a dash of honesty.
Their optimism seems to have been unjustified…
I don’t know. It took over 200 years before we got this pair. Let’s hope that it takes 200 more years to repeat the process. Getting a guy with Cheney’s Machiavellian nature AND Bush’s incompetent inattention AND a Congress which for 6 years turned a blind eye is a one in a million shot.
Well, 1 in 43. Or, at least that’s how it turned out; let’s hope that it was a fluke.
I don’t remember the details of the SCOTUS decision (regarding Cheney claiming executive privilege to keep from disclosing which members of the oil industry dictated our national energy policy), but, if that decision confirmed Cheney’s executive standing, couldn’t it be used as a precedent against him now?
Actually, it appears that Cheney did not assert executive privilege in the task force meeting case. Instead, he claimed that it wasn’t actually a task force, or something similarly Clintonian.
However, the court decision linked above provides an interesting overview of the lower court’s decision:
It appears here not to question that Cheney is part of the executive branch. Granted, in this case Bush appointed him to the panel, but still, I wonder how many other precedents there are for treating the veep as an executive position.
Daniel
Well, there was the Nixon Admin, where the Machiavellian figure was POTUS in his own right and surrounded himself with like-minded aides.
But, yeah, this is worse.