No Checks, No Balances -- No Supervision?

"The calls for impeachment that have been coming from the far left reverberate throughout the conversation, as does the suggestion that President Bush is a Cheney puppet. Some call for congressional action. Support for Cheney comes from a small percentage of those who have weighed in."

Laura Rozen blogs: "Cheney will go to his grave like others before him thinking he was a great patriot who should not be bound by the laws of this country, or the laws of war. But even with all that secret extra-legal power he yielded and bestowed for all these years, he couldn't show success on any front when it mattered."

Steve Benen blogs: "As the Post's profile makes clear, Bush has spent the better part of the last six years simply going along with Cheney's demands. Dan Quayle characterized this as Cheney taking on the role of 'surrogate chief of staff.' The reality is more disconcerting -- Cheney has routinely been the 'surrogate President,' with Bush putting his signature on the VP's ideas because the VP told him it was the right thing to do. . . .

"Meet George W. Bush, the not-so-innocent bystander of his own presidency."

What's To Be Done?

Michael Duffy points out in Time: "Cheney remains quite powerful. That is at least partly because, unlike other powerful figures who became liabilities in previous administrations, there is no moving him along. You can't fire him. You can't reorganize him into another job. You can't compost him -- and find someone to squeeze in on top of him. And there is no evidence that Bush would if he could, though just about every Republican I know privately wonders about this. One former Bush adviser posed the question in a recent conversation: After Iraq, does the President weigh Cheney's advice in the same way?"

The Guantanamo Example

So, has Cheney lost his mojo? Here's a test case.

Helene Cooper and William Glaberson write in the New York Times: "The Bush administration acknowledged Friday that its top officials were once again actively debating recommendations about how and when to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but officials said they thought it could be weeks or months before a decision was made. . . .

"The revival of a bitter, long-running debate behind closed doors in the Bush administration comes only a few months after the Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told President Bush that they believed that Guantanamo's continued existence was undercutting American foreign policy efforts around the world, and would ultimately prove a stain on Mr. Bush's legacy. . . .

"Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice met strong resistance from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who argued that moving the prisoners to American prisons would open a floodgate of litigation. Vice President Dick Cheney has also been reported to be a staunch opponent of transferring prisoners to American soil.

"But Mr. Gonzales has been badly weakened by the political dispute over the dismissals of United States attorneys, and Mr. Cheney's influence has been on the wane, officials say."

Stay tuned.

Cheney Retrospective

A few scenes from some of my past columns: