The only reason I responded to this one was not because I compare the current Obama vs Rush to Bush vs MSM. And if we compared Biden to Cheney then Biden would probably lose as it would be trivial to simply show the amount of power ability cheney had. I’m not going to debate what he did with it, but on absolute grounds Cheney is guaranteed to win, he took the vice presidential office to levels hitherto unknown. All I was getting at is that Rush is too polarizing a figure to have as the face of the Republican party. He’s not running for office but if people associate him as being what the republican party represents then the base will be ecstatic and elections will be lost.

Especially coming from a guy with a rule in his name decrying responses to “people like me” because that is a hardcore bait for a much launch into a really really long response. But I’ll give you two facts because a cursory google search for “cheney vice presidential power” turns up a slew of responses. Oh, and usurp implies he took someone else’s power. He didn’t take someone else power, he created powers he shouldn’t have and asserted a position that has not traditionally been given to the vice president. He also was largely responsible for the tremendous increases in executive power in general. He didn’t just strengthen the vice presidency, it was more about the executive branch in general. By strengthening that branch he awarded the president further powers which he could then either influence the president to use them or use them him self. I’m not a historian but I’m pretty sure there has been at least one vice president who took relate-able steps towards increased vice presidential powers (and executive in general). Although, that neither validates the actions or changes recent history where the vice president has played a significantly more muted role. Not to mention the number of times the vice president has been labeled as largely a meaningless position.

But… you wanted facts so…
There’s the “Treat as Top Secret” classification he created in order to classify documents in a way that would otherwise have required a presidential seal. And followed up with Bill Leonard, head of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), told Rep. Waxman’s staff that Cheney’s office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman. That’s a paraphrase from another article and extremely hear-say-ish so I’m not a fan and maybe it changed afterwards, the source is MSM and from 2007, although the treat as top secret classification is definitely true.

There’s on Capitol Hill, for the first time the vice president sat in on the Republican caucus meetings. Nothing illegal, just unprecedented.

He organized Guantanamo and worked with Yoo to get the legal authorizations for torture. In addition to the other european locations that had our own agents being charged in italian and german courts.
It would be an understatement to say he had a much larger than normal influence with the president. He was rather out there and in the open with he and his office supporting the Iraq war and being the source of media information ala scooter libby. Which later turned out to be categorically false. I believe it was him, not the president that was on “meet the press” confirming the now-known to be false statements about WMD in iraq. Maybe his agents were all wrong, We’ll never know because he hid his records and asserted he was not subject to the same requirements are the president.

But you know, this is so far off topic, I’d much rather keep this discussion to somewhere it’s more useful than on a completely unrelated post where all I was talking about was having a divisive party representative. I’ll gladly discuss cheney and vice presidential powers but this doesn’t seem like the place for it.

I never said I liked him. Thankfully our president is young and hopefully vicepresidential powers will be returned to their previously minor status.