Spencer Ackerman writes:

The week before Dick Cheney died, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, one of the bureaucratic venues through which the most powerful vice president in U.S. history disfigured the country, informed Congress that it would have no say over Donald Trump’s rapidly coalescing military aggression against an oil-rich country.

While self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted over social media about treating the Caribbean fishermen that he insists without evidence are drug smugglers “exactly like al-Qaeda,” Office of Legal Counsel chief T. Elliot Gaiser told a group of legislators that the administration would not be bothering with congressional authorization for an escalating set of strikes carried out as part of a massive U.S. naval buildup. In Gaiser’s sophistry, because the fishermen are unarmed, U.S. personnel are in no danger, so there is no war that fits the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution; it thus follows, in this backward-spooling reasoning, that there are simply no authorities that Congress—the body authorized by the Constitution to declare war—can exercise. Our national legislature, controlled by Republicans loyal to Trump and backfilled with Democrats who seek not the end of the U.S. bloodshed but its constitutionally proper congressional authorization, now faces complete irrelevance as the president pursues a policy of regime change in Venezuela and perhaps a wider campaign of regional destabilization emanating from it.

Cheney, 84, picked an appropriate time to die. His decades-long struggle to consolidate the unparalleled might of U.S. warmaking within the White House has succeeded. “In Cheney’s view,” wrote his biographer Barton Gellman, “the president’s authority was close to absolute within his rightful sphere.” Cheney defined that sphere expansively and fought for his definitions aggressively. When Patrick Leahy accused the former Halliburton CEO of rigging gigantic no-bid contracts for the company in Iraq, Cheney responded, “Fuck yourself.” He later called the exchange “the best thing I ever did.”

The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America. [Continue reading…]