Would a Clinton Appointee Have Come Up With a Different Conclusion?

United States District Judge John D. Bates dismissed former CIA officer Valerie Plame's lawsuit against Vice President Cheney.

The same judge dismissed the GAO's suit against Vice President Cheney regarding the silliness of the energy meetings notes fodlerol.

Also, he was appointed in Dec 2001 by President Bush, and worked with Kenneth Starr (therefore he must be eeeevil with four e's).

Is he being principled? In both cases he narrowly interpreted whether or not civil service employees have standing when suing the Vice President's office.

Is he thwarting overreaching and preening petty bureaucrats from clogging the courts with endless, needless lawsuits whenever they feel 'dissed' by the Vice President's office?

Or is he a 'Bush Crony' rewarding his friends and preventing them from answering for their misdeeds?

I lean towards the petty bureaucrats are insane and looking to sabotage the current administration any way they can angle. I'm not an expert in this area, but it does seem that the ability for one part of the government to sue another part of the government should be severely limited, and only taken up in the most egregious of cases (neither of these would even remotely qualify).

There are those out there who want to make 'governing while Republican' a crime. That's the impression I get from much of this nonsense. Bureaucracy is always going to lean towards the party that favors entitlements, government programs, and federal micromanagement of all things great and small. Both parties can answer to that description to one degree or another, but the Democrats have no recent history of even the pretense of wanting small government to rein them in. That's why for now and the foreseeable future, the federal bureaucracies will lean heavily Democratic and play petty little game (leaks, lawsuits, malingering) whenever Republicans manage to gain control of the Executive branch.

When Oprah is President Obama's Vice President (you know the O&O ticket makes sense, don't you?), I'll bet she does things that would make even Cheney blush. I also bet there won't be a single lawsuit brought against her by some petty bureaucrat fearful of her secretive ways.

All this concern within the bureaucracy about the overreaching Vice President's office wasn't around when it was Vice President Al Gore doing the overreaching. In countless ways, Gore was Cheney's equal, if not superior in crafting new powers for his office. But he's a darling of the inside the beltway folks, so he got a pass. But he set a precedent that Cheney followed and expanded upon, and now the bureaucrats are upset, but they don't have a leg to stand on (or legal standing), to complain because of their silence when it was Al Gore doing his business.

Either put real limits into the job that the VP can do, or go back to directly electing the VP as we did in the past. Many states still elect their Lieutenant Governors, and so far, that hasn't lead to too much trouble (a little trouble here in CA back in the day when Mike Curb took advantage of some loopholes, but that was fun, and it was the late 70s). A person essentially appointed to the position (nominally elected), shouldn't wield real power, and should just be an understudy as it had been for most of the 20th century (until Gore decided to go crazy with the job). The executive has the right to delegate as he chooses, but I think it would be wise to choose not to delegate too much to an office that's nebulously defined constitutionally and traditionally weak.

If either of the eventual candidates for President wants to win points, they should pledge to NOT delegate too much responsibility on to their Veep.

Bring back the days of Dan Quayle, he was the perfect Veep.