What's at stake

It's easy to forget that it's just the soul of the country at stake here.

First in a WaPo series into the 4th branch of government under Cheney:

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these. [emphasis added]

Get it? The Office of the President had NO RECORD of a Presidential Order authorizing the most sweeping expansion of domestic surveillance authority in history.

This is the danger of electing Presidents who are essentially tools of the neocons and wingnuts who wield them. Dick Cheney was, for all intents and purposes, the 43rd President of the United States.

Even the Supreme Court didn't choose him.

[UPDATE]

McJoan at DKos reviews a new book by James Pfiffiner with more on the subject of this dramatic expansion of Executive authority, and why it so threatens our Constitution:

--He created military commissions entirely within the executive branch and in doing so ignored U.S. laws that provided authority and procedures for establishing military commissions;

--He used the term "enemy combatant" to exempt the government from granting persons so labeled legal and constitutional rights;

--He denied the writ of habeas corpus to U.S. citizens as well as other detainees suspected of terrorism;

--He suspended the Geneva Conventions, which, because they were agreed to in a treaty, are the "supreme Law of the Land," according to Article VI of the Constitution;

--He authorized the interrogation of detainees using techniques that most of the world considers torture, and which violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law;

--He ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the communications of Americans without a warrant as required by FISA; and

--He asserted the sweeping right to ignore more than 1,000 provisions of public law because he deemed them to be in conflict with his authority as president.