Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s final political act was also his most admirable. Warning that then-candidate Donald Trump “can never be trusted with power again,” Cheney, a Republican, urged 2024 voters to elect Trump’s Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, as president — a rare example of a prominent political leader placing principle over party.
Trump’s imperial presidency is Dick Cheney’s final legacy
Cheney’s final political act was patriotism, but his life’s work was autocracy.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
Yet, while Cheney, who died on Monday, rejected Trump because of his use of “lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” in 2020, Trump’s second presidency owes a great deal to Cheney himself.
Cheney was one of the primary architects of the imperial powers that Trump now wields as president. He was one of the most influential and powerful advocates of the theory of the “unitary executive,” an expansive theory of presidential power that all six of the Supreme Court’s Republicans now view as gospel. Cheney imagined a presidency that was largely unchecked by Congress and free to act swiftly and even violently. And now, we have the very kind of presidency that Cheney sought throughout his long career.
Cheney sought to subordinate Congress to the presidency, especially on matters of national security
Days after President Ronald Reagan was first elected in 1980, his future chief of staff, James Baker, sought advice from Cheney, who had held the same job under President Gerald Ford. Baker’s notes on that meeting began with a theme that animated much of Cheney’s career: “Restore power & auth to Exec Branch -- Need strong ldr’ship. Get rid of War Powers Act -- restore independent rights.”
The reference to the War Powers Resolution — a 1973 law that requires the president to consult with Congress before using military force and that requires that use of force to terminate after 60 days without congressional approval — embodied Cheney’s view of the balance of power between Congress and the president.
As Jo Becker and Barton Gellman wrote in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Cheney in 2007, Cheney viewed Congress as an unnecessary speed bump in the fast-moving game of international power politics. The mere fact that Congress has appropriated funds to the military, Cheney argued in 1983, means “the president has the authority to make decisions about how to use those things.”
Ironically, Cheney made these remarks while he was serving in the House of Representatives, so his commitment to a powerful executive trumped any commitment to the institution he was then a part of. Congress, Cheney claimed, is “all too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment” and lacks the resources “that would enable Congress to be an equal partner with the president” in making swift decisions about foreign policy and national security.
If this vision of a swift and decisive president, unconstrained by legal barriers erected by Congress, sounds familiar, it should. It is the driving force behind Trump v. United States (2024), the benighted Supreme Court opinion holding that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.
That decision, which was joined by all six Republican justices, cites no constitutional provision that places the president above the law. Instead, it roots presidential immunity from the criminal law in a distinctly Cheney-like belief that “the President would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive” if he had to fear prosecution for his own criminality.
Cheney championed the “unitary executive”
The Trump immunity decision was also the triumph of another legal theory championed by Cheney: the “unitary executive.” As legal scholar Marty Lederman summarized Cheney’s understanding of this theory in 2007, the unitary executive is the belief that “the president and the president’s close advisers should have the final word — indeed the only word — on all matters within the executive branch.”
And thus, as vice president, Cheney sought to “stamp out or to relegate to the margins any dissenting views, whether it be in the military…or in the intelligence agencies, when they’re not giving him the stories about Iraq and elsewhere that he wants to hear; or at the Department of Justice, when they’re coming up with legal opinions that don’t correspond to the legal judgments that the vice president has.”
As Lederman alludes to, perhaps the most famous example of Cheney’s efforts to subordinate national security officials to President George W. Bush’s agenda was his efforts to undermine intelligence officials and agencies that doubted Bush’s rationale for the Iraq War.
Ordinarily, raw intelligence data is closely evaluated and contextualized by intelligence professionals before it is seen by the most senior officials in government. During the lead-up to the Iraq War, however, Cheney directed the CIA to “stovepipe” raw intelligence to his office. He then plucked out information that seemed to support the case for war, such as documents suggesting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium that the CIA determined were most likely fabricated and used those documents to sell the war to the American people.
Cheney, in other words, saw executive branch officials as servants of the president and his agenda — and thus, the purpose of federal agencies was to drive that agenda forward. Professionalism, reliability, or the intelligence agencies’ independent duty to produce truthful information were all subordinated to the president’s goals.
This vision of executive branch officials as wholly subordinate to the president now animates the Supreme Court’s approach to the separation of powers. It is the driving force behind the Court’s decisions permitting Trump to fire virtually anyone in any federal agency, from agency leaders to rank-and-file civil servants — even when Congress gave job protection to these officials. It’s also front and center in the cursed Trump immunity decision, which even permits Trump to order the Justice Department to target his perceived enemies “for an improper purpose.”
Cheney was not wrong that Trump cannot be trusted with the powers he now wields. But Cheney worked as diligently as anyone to give Trump many of those powers. The late former vice president may have cast his final, patriotic vote for Kamala Harris, but he bears as much responsibility for Trump’s imperial presidency as any other American.
