| Subject: Amid War, GAO Puts Legal Fight With Cheney on Hold Agency Head Predicts A Similar Clash With Ridge's Homeland Office |
Author:
No name
| [ Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 15:05:17 12/03/01 Mon
Amid War, GAO Puts Legal Fight With Cheney on Hold Agency Head Predicts A Similar Clash With Ridge's Homeland Office
By Michael Grunwald and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 9, 2001; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64520-2001Nov8?language=printer
This summer, the General Accounting Office was spoiling for an unprecedented legal and constitutional clash with Vice President Cheney.
Cheney had refused to turn over records from his energy task force, and the GAO, the 80-year-old investigative arm of Congress, was preparing to sue a federal entity for the first time. Comptroller General David M. Walker described the fight as a direct threat to the GAO's reason for being, a separation-of-powers issue that would determine whether the legislative branch could exercise the oversight role envisioned by the founding fathers.
"[Cheney's] attorneys are engaged in a broad-based frontal attack on our statutory authority," Walker told The Washington Post in August. "We cannot let that stand."
But the GAO is letting it stand -- at least for now. Walker put the lawsuit on hold after the terrorist attacks two months ago, and he said yesterday that it may stay on hold. But he predicted that the power struggle over transparency in the Bush White House might shift to a "new battleground": congressional oversight of Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security.
Walker said he had already received several congressional requests for information that will require him to interact with Ridge's office, and he suggested that a similar clash over the GAO's right to White House documents may be in the offing. But although he said the energy task force lawsuit is "not a dead issue" and upbraided Cheney's office for "stonewalling," he made it clear that the disbanded task force had slipped far down the GAO's priority list.
"Candidly, this is another example of how the events of September 11th have had a significant ripple effect on a range of issues, some of which have nothing to do with terrorism," said Walker, who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush as an assistant labor secretary before President Bill Clinton put him in charge of the GAO. "On Sept. 10, there was virtually no question we were headed to court. But now, not only do we have to assess when it's appropriate to do that, we have to assess whether it's appropriate to do that."
Energy policy remains a key issue; the GOP-controlled House passed a comprehensive energy bill reflecting the recommendations of Cheney's task force, and the Democratic-controlled Senate is preparing a rival bill. What has changed is the political landscape. The nation is at war, Bush has sky-high approval ratings, and even the most partisan Democrats are avoiding all-out melees with the administration.
Take Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee. In April, he and Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) launched the controversy, requesting a GAO investigation of Cheney's task force and its interactions with major Bush campaign donors. This summer, after Cheney's counsel responded that the GAO had no legal authority to demand documentation of task force meetings or participants, Waxman ripped the White House for "distorting the law to shield against routine oversight" and "demeaning the constitutional prerogatives available to the president."
Yesterday, Waxman said he was still concerned that the Bush administration wanted to evade congressional scrutiny, but he also expressed anxiety about the appearance of disunity during wartime. He said he thought the GAO should sue "as long as we're not looking at a confrontation with the vice president," which is exactly what a lawsuit would be.
Senate Democrats have sounded even less enthusiastic about a high-stakes legal battle with a wartime White House. "You've got to ask: How many different fronts can you open?" said Bill Wicker, spokesman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
White House officials, after accusing congressional Democrats of practicing "the politics of personal destruction" earlier in the dispute, simply referred to a letter Cheney wrote in August, a dry statement that Walker's actions "exceed his lawful authority and . . . unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the Executive Branch." Cheney's attorneys have argued that the GAO was entitled only to basic information, such as the costs of the task force, and not to documents about undecided policies.
Walker said the GAO still rejects those arguments, but he acknowledged that wartime politics had dimmed enthusiasm for challenging them. "It's ridiculous to say that's not an issue," he said. "But it's not the only issue."
Another issue, Walker said, is that the GAO wants to focus more on homeland security and does not want to distract the administration from doing the same. And as Congress moves forward on an energy bill, he said, the process that led to Cheney's recommendations may no longer seem so important. Plus, the creation of Ridge's office offers a new potential venue for resolving questions about congressional oversight of White House activities.
Walker would not say which members of Congress had asked him for information he would need from Ridge, or what information they were seeking. But he noted that the GAO has completed 70 reports on homeland security issues in the past five years -- Ridge had one of them on his desk during his recent interview with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw -- and predicted that Congress would not stand for being kept in the dark about domestic defense. He also noted that Ridge had declined requests to testify before congressional committees.
"There's no doubt that Congress feels much stronger about the need to exercise reasonable oversight in the critical area of homeland security than it does about" the Cheney task force, Walker said. "This could become the new battleground."
America's new war, after all, has not squelched all challenges to executive authority. Rep. Dan Burton, the outspoken Indiana Republican who chairs the House Governmental Reform Committee, has paused in his efforts to force the Bush administration to release records related to the Clinton-Gore campaign finance scandals. But earlier this week, committee member Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) pointedly urged President Bush to rescind an executive order that vastly expanded his power to keep presidential records secret.
Meanwhile, senators from both parties have complained that briefings about war and anthrax have been practically devoid of information. Yesterday, the group Public Citizen complained to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson that a new pharmaceutical industry task force on bioterrorism violated federal open-government laws. (A Thompson spokesman responded that the task force was not created or controlled by the department, so those laws were irrelevant.) And many Democrats want the Office of Homeland Security established by law so that its director can be directly accountable to Congress.
"It is what I fear may be a pattern," Waxman said. "If you have a head of homeland security solely within the White House, they can refuse to answer questions from Congress."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
] |
|
Feedback: 