Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

In his first discussion of the underpinnings of the Bush administration's decision to eavesdrop without warrants on communications between the United States and abroad, Vice President Dick Cheney cast the action today as part of a broader effort to reassert powers of the presidency that he said had been dangerously eroded in the years after Vietnam and Watergate.

Talking with a small group of reporters on Air Force Two as he flew from Pakistan to Oman, Mr. Cheney spoke in far broader terms about the effort to expand the powers of the executive than President Bush did on Monday during an hourlong news conference.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it," said Mr. Cheney, who was in many ways the intellectual instigator of the rapid expansion of presidential authority as soon as Mr. Bush came to office.

Today, he made no effort to play down his central role in aggressively seizing those powers, citing his early battle to keep private the names of people he consulted while drawing up recommendations for Mr. Bush on energy policy. That effort was ultimately upheld in the courts.

Mr. Cheney appears to have been the first senior administration official to brief a very small number of Congressional leaders on the program and the underlying technology that has permitted the National Security Agency to find and immediately tap into "hot numbers" - telephone calls and e-mail messages suspected to contain communications between terror suspects in the United States and abroad.

Ordinarily, any tap that includes one party inside the United States has required obtaining a warrant from a secret court that oversees the enforcement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - itself an effort to address of the abuses during the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Cheney was unapologetic about circumventing the legal protections, echoing President Bush's declarations that it was an appropriate use of executive authority, and going further than Mr. Bush by insisting that it has prevented subsequent attacks.

"The fact of the matter is this is a good, solid program," he said on CNN during his stopover in Pakistan. "It has saved thousands of lives, we are doing exactly the right thing, we are doing it in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, and it ought to be supported. This is not about violating civil liberties, because we're not."

Later, aboard Air Force Two, he said, "I'm sure there is going to be a debate," adding, "It's an important subject." But having served in Congress as chief of staff to President Ford - a period when he first became concerned about infringements on presidential power - he said he believed the pendulum had swung back too far after the Nixon resignation.

After expressing respect for the powers of Congress, he told reporters: "But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy."

He described the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973 in a post-Vietnam effort by Congress to prevent the president from committing troops without sharp congressional oversight, as "an infringement on the authority of the presidency" and suggested it could be unconstitutional. Similarly, he said budget legislation passed in the 1970's restricted the president's ability to impound money.

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the '70's served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Mr. Cheney said.

Mr. Cheney's philosophy on both the wiretap issues and detention and interrogation policy took legal form in a series of memorandums and briefs, many of them written by John C. Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's office of legal counsel.

Professor Yoo, a mild-mannered legal scholar from Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, has told friends that he was taken aback when he became the best-known proponent of pushing the envelope of presidential powers. But many of the documents he and his colleagues wrote described broad and unilateral executive power to combat terrorism, including detaining people without charge indefinitely, subjecting detainees to harsh interrogations and to eavesdropping without first obtaining warrants, under some conditions.

For example, in a Sept. 21, 2001, memorandum, administration lawyers said that eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages without a court's permission could be proper, notwithstanding the Fourth Amendments ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The government may be justified," Mr. Yoo wrote in the memorandum, "in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." Four days later, Mr. Yoo wrote that Congress cannot place "limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response."

"These decisions," wrote Mr. Yoo, who left the administration two years ago, "under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make."

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