   But it is inappropriate for the vice president or the president to be ordering that a program be kept secret and not disclosed at the highest levels of congressional leadership.
   We have to have a check and balance in our system. To give to the president unbridled power and authority goes way beyond what our Constitution has in mind.
That system of checks and balances has been battered to the breaking point over the past four years.
The process of restoring it will only be completed if those who were responsible for the battery are held to account. And the list of these wrongdoers begins with the name "Dick Cheney."
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.
Ã"šÃ‚ © 2009 TheNation.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141290/
   We have to have a check and balance in our system. To give to the president unbridled power and authority goes way beyond what our Constitution has in mind.
That system of checks and balances has been battered to the breaking point over the past four years.
The process of restoring it will only be completed if those who were responsible for the battery are held to account. And the list of these wrongdoers begins with the name "Dick Cheney."
Ã"šÃ‚ © 2009 TheNation.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141290/
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