Cheney to Congress: Shut up

And that was when he, Dick Cheney, was himself a Congressman. Sean Wilentz looks at the long-forgotten minority report that dissented with the findings of the Iran-Contra committee.

The Reagan administration, according to the report, had erred by failing to offer a stronger, principled defense of what Mr. Cheney and others considered its full constitutional powers. Not only did the report defend lawbreaking by White House officials; it condemned Congress for having passed the laws in the first place.

The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress.

Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”

History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

These conclusions went beyond what had long been considered the outermost limits of presidential power — and they put a special twist on history. Hamilton certainly desired a strong executive, but warned that it would be “utterly unsafe and improper” to give a president complete control over foreign policy.

The Curtiss-Wright decision actually concerned a presidential claim of constitutional power to act in the absence of an act passed by Congress, not in violation of such an act.

One of the foremost constitutional scholars of the 20th century, Edward S. Corwin, stated in 1957 that the Constitution was “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy,” and that in many cases “the lion’s share” of that privilege belonged to the president. But Corwin finally insisted that “the power to determine the substantive content of American foreign policy is a divided power.”

The Iran-contra joint committee majority in 1987, including some Senate Republican members, charged that the minority report, with tortuous illogic, reduced Congress’s foreign policy role to nearly nothing. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican and vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigating committee, paraphrased Adlai Stevenson and quipped that the minority report had separated the wheat from the chaff and left in the chaff.

His comments did not lead Mr. Cheney to alter course, as Mr. Cheney’s actions as vice president demonstrate. Asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Mr. Cheney replied, “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.”

“Nobody has ever read them,” he said, but they “are very good in laying out a robust view of the president’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.”

To Cheney, Nixon was hounded from office by unscrupulous Democrats. I have heard some long associates of his say they are shocked by the change in Cheney's world view since assuming his current role. If so, they were either blind or stupid.