Back in the days when I was rolling in the college debate community, we would discuss, both in-round and out of round, different strategies for political and social engagement. This would cover just about everything, ranging from whether or not use of Congress was preferable to using courts to the abstruse rubbish of pomoddery, e.g., "OH NOES! IT'S TEH PATRIARCHY!" One argument that I always found entirely compelling was that one should always take the enemy at its word. Take them at their hypocritical word, expose the gap between their word and what is the case. Take their word, hold them to it and strangle them with their hypocrisy. It's a particularly useful tactic to use against Republicans.
And that's just what Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) is doing. He's strangling Cheney with his hypocrisy.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois is threatening to defund the office of the vice president in response to revelations that Dick Cheney is locked in a dispute with the National Archives over the preservation of classified documents.
Emanuel plans to offer an amendment to a spending bill next week to defund Cheney's office. The vice president's office contends that, as president of the Senate, he and his staff are not a part of the executive branch but rather an office in the legislative branch.
"The Vice President has a choice to make," Emanuel said in a statement. "If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules."
Now, let's examine the Vice President's claim without the instinctive "OH NOES! PROTECT TEH GOP!" filter that The Politico brings to things. The Vice President claims that since he is The President of The Senate, he is under the legislative, and not the executive branch of the government, and, as such, he is not subject to the disclosure rules and so forth of the executive branch.
- 1. The Vice President's office has never, never been funded through anything except appropriations for the Executive Branch. Not once in history has the Veep been funded through the legislative branch for anything except his office and staff in The Senate.
- 2. Let's look at The Constitution and see what they have to say about this. Article 1, Section 3:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided."
Now, is there anything else? No. Not a single other thing on the Veep's legislative responsibilities. The document goes on to document in painful detail everything else about the legislators, their chambers and their operations. So what's the deal, here? He's barely mentioned in Article 2, granted, but that's because the de facto assumption is that the duties and qualifications of the Veep are identical to those of the President. Think about it - he has to be able to step into the shoes of the President at the drop of a hat.
So why does Darth Cheney think that he's somehow immune from the rules governing the Executive Branch? Dollars to doughnuts - he doesn't. This is just a ploy to keep some kind of rules from applying to him. How absolutely ridiculous. Good for Rahmbo for going after him.
-dx
p.s. This post saw the debut of a new category, IOKIYAR. This is slang, short for "It's Okay If You're A Republican." Since I've been writing about Republican hypocrisy a lot recently, I figure that it warrants its own category. Hurrah, Republican hypocrisy! :)
