He wants to defund the Vice President of the United States.
Sen. Dick Durbin thinks he may have found a way to get Vice President Dick Cheney's attention on the matter of the vice president's refusal to annually report how much information his office classifies and declassifies:
Pull the funding for the vice president's office.
The vice president's residence is safe, however -- the lights will remain on.
For several years, Cheney has refused to comply with an executive order – which his boss, the president, signed, in 2003 – requiring any entity within the executive branch to report annually on its classification activity.
...Durbin (D-Ill.) is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. So today, he included wording in his appropriation bill to suspend funds for the Office of the Vice President next year unless until Cheney complies with Executive Order 12958.
The order demands an annual accounting of the classification and declassification of government records by the Information Security and Oversight Office of the National Archives, which in turn calls on executive offices to report their volume of activity. Dozens of agencies report in each year, but the vice president's office has refused since 2003.
"This executive order establishes uniform, government-wide procedures for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information,'' Durbin noted today. "Among other obligations, it requires an "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information" to report annually on how much it is keeping secret.
"The Office of the Vice President asserts that it is not such an “entity within the executive branch,'' Durbin said in a statement issued today. "Serious questions have been raised recently about both the legality and the appropriateness of the Vice President exempting his office from the rules that apply to all other Executive Branch officials.''
So Durbin's committee today "took the step of restricting funding for the Office of the Vice President for fiscal year 2008 unless and until they comply with the executive order.'' This bill has a few hurdles to get through, of course, not the least of which is the president's signature.
Cheney can sleep well at night, in any case.
Durbin notes that funding for the official residence of the vice president comes from a different account and is not affectied by today's committee action.
Good grief.
Durbin is nuts. And this man occupies the Dems' second highest position of power in the U.S. Senate.
It seems every day he morphs more into being like Dennis Kucinich.
What a guy!
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others —that had no concern for human beings."
--DICK DURBIN
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