It took six years, but the WaPo finally got its hands on the heretofore secret meetings Dick Cheney held as part of his energy task-force in 2001. In news that will surprise absolutely no one, it turns out the VP listened to the energy industry when shaping the administration’s policy.
One of the first visitors, on Feb. 14, was James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; a week later, longtime Bush supporter Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp., came by for the first of two meetings. On March 5, some of the country’s biggest electric utilities, including Duke Energy and Constellation Energy Group, had an audience with the task force staff.
British Petroleum representatives dropped by on March 22, one of about 20 oil and drilling companies to get meetings. The National Mining Association, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America and the American Petroleum Institute were among three dozen trade associations that met with Cheney’s staff, the document shows.
The list of participants’ names and when they met with administration officials provides a clearer picture of the task force’s priorities and bolsters previous reports that the review leaned heavily on oil and gas companies and on trade groups — many of them big contributors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party.
You don’t say. What’s more, the WaPo found that Cheney did deign to allow his task force to meet with environmental groups, but only after the first draft his report was nearly done (a tidbit the VP’s office did not share with the conservationists).
Obviously, knowing what we know of Cheney, this is all par for the course. But let’s not forget, the VP fought relentlessly to keep these lists secret, going all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent anyone from learning about his meetings. We all assumed Cheney was taking orders from Kenny Boy Lay and ExxonMobil lobbyists, but the VP fought tooth and nail to keep it secret anyway.
The question now is, why’d he bother? It’s not as obvious as it might sound.
TNR’s Bradford Plumer asks:
So why did Cheney kept these names classified for six years — citing executive privilege and going all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent Congress from learning who he was meeting with? What difference would it have made? Was he just being secretive on principle? (Probably.)
On that last point, that was my assumption. Cheney has been obsessed with White House secrecy for decades, as part of his vision for bolstering presidential power post-Watergate. Whether people knew he was letting polluters write the administration’s energy policy was irrelevant, I thought; the point was to fight for secrecy in general.
But then Kevin Drum came up with a clever observation.
Cast your mind back to early 2001. It was before 9/11, before Abu Ghraib, before the signing statements and the suspension of habeas corpus. George Bush had just spent the previous year campaigning as a compassionate conservative. He had promised to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. He had won a bitter recount in Florida and the conventional wisdom suggested that the closeness of his victory meant that he’d need to adopt a moderate, bipartisan tone. And, in fact, he was doing just that, inviting Ted Kennedy to screenings in the White House theater while they worked together like old friends to pass No Child Left Behind. It’s hard to believe now, but at the time spring was in the air.
Today, this is all long gone. We look at the people Cheney met with and our reaction is “Eh. What else did you expect?” But back in early 2001, that wasn’t what people expected. They still believed in Bush the bipartisan moderate consensus builder, the new kind of Republican who wasn’t solely beholden to the usual corporate interests. Making the list of task force meetings public would have put something of a crimp in that image, wouldn’t it?
Maybe. In mid-2001, Bush still had some post-election goodwill. If America knew the whole truth about Cheney’s energy task force, there would have been some fairly significant blowback. With that in mind, principles about presidential prerogatives, at a minimum, coincided with self-interest.
But maybe folks can refresh my memory. Wasn’t the “uniter, not divider” myth pretty thoroughly discredited by mid-2001? In May of that year, Jim Jeffords was so disgusted with the GOP (and Bush in particular) that he left the party and swung the Senate to the Dems. He wouldn’t have done this if Bush was maintaining an image of reasonable centrism. For that matter, if memory serves, the president’s approval ratings were already in decline around that time after a post-inauguration honeymoon.
Am I remembering this wrong?