Breaking the Law is Settled Law

Saturday's Wall Street Journal carries an interview with Dick Cheney, written up by James Taranto (subs. req'd, free link). The article is mostly an excuse for Taranto to recycle daily spin from his OpinionJournal column, but there are a couple of interesting exchanges with Cheney. One turns on the question of whether the President is bound by legislation in the conduct of war or foreign policy; Cheney leans in the negative:

That lesson was reinforced for then-Rep. Cheney in 1987, when he was the ranking Republican on the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Democrats accused President Reagan of violating the Boland amendment, intended to prevent aid from reaching Nicaragua's anticommunist guerrillas. "If you go back and look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra report, you'll see a strong statement about the president's prerogatives and responsibilities in the foreign policy/national security area in particular."

Several things to note. First, it's clear that in Cheney's view, the arguments justifying the National Security Agency domestic spying program in terms of the 9/11 War Resolution passed by Congress are moot, because he believes that the President has those powers within his national security and foreign policy prerogatives anyway, and not just when war has been formally declared.

Second, Cheney believes that the Iran-Contra scandal was not a scandal, which is something that ace TV pundits might want to ask him about in his next TV appearance -- in particular as the abject failure of the plan (it was supposed to get hostages in Lebanon released) should be a caution about the problem of unconstrained executive branch scheming.

Finally, while analysts have corrected focused on the resilience of the careers of the people implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney's quote makes clear that it was a formative experience for him as well, from the outside looking in. One wonders if he thought less of George H.W. Bush for having claimed to be out of the loop on such a fine enterprise?