When is dick cheney going to die

She opposed Republican efforts to overturn the election results. But Cheney and Trump sometimes see eye to eye—notably, on the matter of resuming torture of military detainees. The bulk of Republicans in Congress support overturning the election result and even outright sedition—and those are just their most recent offenses.

The twenty-first-century legacy of the GOP also includes voter suppression, gerrymandering, racist incitement, rejection of democratic electoral processes, a fondness for forever wars, and total disregard for the devastation wreaked by the pandemic.

The Trump era has been hell. But so would Cheneyism redux be. You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. Jacob Silverman SilvermanJacob. Want more politics, health care, and media updates? While attending classes, he worked as a power lineman in a working-class town. Although Yale had not suited Cheney, he decided to pursue college once more.

He enrolled at the University of Wyoming, where he received a B. During his time as a student, Cheney applied for and received five draft deferments and thus avoided being drafted in the Vietnam War, stating that he "had other priorities in the '60s than military service.

With two degrees under his belt, Cheney started his political career in He worked as a part-time legislative intern to the Wyoming Senate legislature, which had a Republican majority. Cheney and his wife, both of whom had been raised in Democratic households, began professionally associating as Republicans.

After Cheney won a national writing contest for student political scientists, he was offered a position as an aide to Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles. Lynne received her doctorate in English, but Cheney had not yet finished his dissertation when he received a fellowship to work in Washington, D. Cheney later indicated that he wanted to go into politics because of his dissatisfaction with ivory tower academia: "I was always struck, because [there were] a lot of complaints about the administration, the management of the university, oftentimes about the students — sort of critical of everybody out there, because the place was chaotic at that time.

There were days when the National Guard was out with its tear gas trying to control the protesters. These folks were unhappy with what was happening, but in all the time I'd been in Wisconsin not one of these folks had ever stood up and been counted on either side of the debate.

They were totally disengaged. While serving as Steiger's aide, Cheney wrote an administrative memo discussing how then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld should handle his confirmation hearings to become the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Steiger showed the memo to Rumsfeld, who promptly hired Cheney.

This was the beginning of a powerful Washington relationship that informed every subsequent Republican administration into the s. When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the election, Cheney moved back to Wyoming to run for the state's sole seat in the House of Representatives.

His high-stress political life was beginning to take a toll, though: Cheney suffered his first heart attack during the campaign, at only 37 years of age. Successful nonetheless, Cheney became a powerful Republican congressman. He won re-election five times, serving as chairman of the House Republican Conference and becoming House Minority Whip in December Before the st Congress could convene, Cheney was unexpectedly selected to be the secretary of defense for incoming President George H.

As defense secretary, Cheney dealt with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of defense spending. He earned the respect of the military with his careful handling of Operation Desert Storm.

When Bill Clinton was elected to the presidency in , Cheney left the government and joined the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Though he contemplated running for president in , he instead opted in to become CEO of energy services company Halliburton, which required him to move to Dallas. In Texas Governor George W.

Bush asked Cheney to head up the search for his vice presidential nominee. Bush eventually asked Cheney himself to serve as his vice president. Cheney then resigned as CEO of Halliburton and focused on the campaign. Until then, the NSA had generally been barred from carrying out surveillance inside the United States. It could spy on suspected foreign agents inside the country, but only by obtaining a warrant from a special court; without a warrant, it could conduct its activities only overseas.

Stellar Wind gave the NSA legal authority to monitor communications in the United States if one party to the conversation was overseas and one of the participants was believed to have some connection to al-Qaeda.

These loose standards opened the way for the agency to begin collecting massive amounts of data. Previously, the NSA had to identify particular individuals to target; with the new data, it could discover individuals it had not previously known and subject them to surveillance. The program operated like a drift net.

The Terrorist Surveillance Program would engender years of intense controversy. The order establishing the program required that it be reauthorized by Bush roughly every 45 days.

At one point in early , Justice Department lawyers, along with FBI Director Robert Mueller and Assistant Attorney General James Comey, objected to one part of the secret program and threatened to resign on the grounds that Bush had no constitutional authority to authorize such surveillance without congressional approval. The following year, The New York Times revealed the existence of the program, prompting Cheney to say that the newspaper should be prosecuted for publishing classified information.

Read: Humanizing Dick Cheney. Nervous intelligence officials insisted that the administration should at least tell a few congressional leaders what it was doing, and the administration agreed to conduct regular briefings at the White House for the leaders of the congressional intelligence committees. It was, to say the least, an unusual hands-on role for a vice president of the United States. One of the congressional reforms of the s had been the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of , the law that restricted NSA operations inside the United States.

The new Terrorist Surveillance Program dramatically weakened that law, but Congress was not asked to approve that weakening. By November, as the war in Afghanistan was reaching its peak, the Bush administration faced a new series of questions.

The issue was what to do with them: Where should they be held, how should they be treated, should they be put on trial? Unlike the earlier controversy over surveillance, several government agencies and Cabinet officials were involved in the detention questions, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice trials , the Defense Department holding the prisoners , the State Department dealing with the international community , and the NSC, which was supposed to coordinate all these bureaucracies.

Still, the vice president, who had no direct constitutional or statutory responsibility for these issues, managed to exert his will. In the earliest of these disputes, the administration had to decide on the legal process for handling the new detainees. Should al-Qaeda members be considered prisoners of war or international criminals? Should they stand trial in U. Should they instead be tried in some other kind of court?

Powell had appointed one of his aides, Pierre Prosper, to oversee an interagency task force addressing this question. He assigned Addington to draft an order under which the detainees would have none of the rights or legal protections allowed in civilian courts or regular military courts. Instead, they could be held indefinitely without trial, with their fates to be decided by secret military commissions similar to those established in World War II to try Nazi saboteurs.

Some officials, including John Bellinger, a lawyer for the NSC, tried to argue that this precedent no longer applied because it had been invalidated by a series of subsequent laws and treaties. Rice told Bush that if this happened again, she might resign. Eight of the detainees captured in Afghanistan were British citizens; the British government protested for years that these military commissions set up by the United States did not meet the standards of international law. Thus a pattern was set that would be repeated on other occasions: Cheney would initiate new antiterrorism programs, and Powell would find himself trying to defend them when they incurred the wrath and opposition of other countries.

The next question was where to put the hundreds of foreign fighters who had been captured. Finally, a solution emerged, and from a familiar source. In such a place, the detainees would have no access to the courts or other constitutional protections. Cheney maintained later that it was the Defense Department that suggested the U. It was entirely under the control of the U. The Pentagon press office released photographs of prisoners in orange jumpsuits, some with their hands tied behind their backs, with barbed-wire and chain-link fences in the background.