What are you hiding Cheney?

Vice President Asks U.S. Court to Keep Energy Task Force Records Secret

01.27.05-- Lawyers for Vice President Dick Cheney asked a U.S appeals court to shield records from his 2001 energy task force from disclosure to advocacy groups that say the panel was influenced by corporations.

Advocacy groups are trying to find out how much influence industry lobbyists may have had on the energy task force, which President George W. Bush created after taking office in 2001. The panel's recommendations, including tax breaks for oil and natural- gas producers and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, haven't won approval in Congress.

``The grave constitutional problem here'' is that a federal law on advisory committees ``is being applied to the office of the president to govern how the president gets his advice,'' Judge A. Raymond Randolph said as the eight-member U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments today in Washington.

Federal law says deliberations of executive branch advisory committees can be kept private only if a panel is made up entirely of full-time federal officials. The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch want to show that non-government officials were, in effect, members of the panel to bolster the groups' bid to make the task force deliberations public.

Judicial Watch describes itself as a government watchdog group.

Cheney, 63, former chairman of Halliburton Co., the world's biggest oilfield services company, was chairman of the energy task force. The General Accounting Office, a congressional auditing agency, reported in 2003 that Cheney met with then-Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay and that the panel also got recommendations from companies such as Chevron Corp., now named ChevronTexaco Corp., and General Motors Corp.

Supreme Court Ruling

The GAO has been renamed the Government Accountability Office.

The D.C. Circuit had previously ruled that Cheney's bid to block all record disclosure was premature. The U.S. Supreme Court last June gave Cheney a new chance to avoid turning over the records, citing a need to protect presidential confidentiality.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court that the advocacy groups ``ask for everything under the sky'' and their document requests were ``anything but appropriate.'' The 7-2 decision sent the case back to the appeals court.

To get the documents ``there has to be something more than just allegations of misconduct,'' Paul D. Clement, acting U.S. solicitor general, told the D.C. Circuit. ``At issue here is the president's determination of who is going to be a member of a presidential committee.'' (looks like it is going to be BIG BUSINESS)

Separation of Powers

Clement argued that having to disclose who attended task force meetings would violate the U.S. Constitution's separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government. He said such disclosure would harm the president's ability to get confidential advice.

Some of the judges questioned the advocacy groups' argument that ordering Cheney to turn over the records is the best way to determine whether their lawsuit has merit.

``How does participation suddenly blossom into full membership'' on the task force, Randolph asked Judicial Watch lawyer Paul Orfanedes.

``You're proceeding as if this is ordinary litigation, and the Supreme Court has made it quite clear that this isn't ordinary litigation because of the involvement of the vice president,'' Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg told Orfanedes.

``These guys are saying we have to prove our lawsuit before we have an opportunity'' to view the records, Orfanedes said in an interview after the argument. ``It's completely backward.''

The case is: In re Cheney, 02-5354.