Court lets Cheney keep records secret

By Stephen Henderson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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The court, in a 7-2 ruling on procedural grounds, didn't address the administration's extraordinary request for secrecy head-on. The justices said a lower court was wrong to summarily dismiss an administration effort to avoid revealing information about the task force in a lawsuit brought by government watchdogs and environmentalists.

The case goes back to the lower court, where there couldn't possibly be a final decision and appeals by Election Day.

"This ruling means that for now the public will remain in the dark about the Bush administration and energy-industry executives' secret meetings about national energy policy," said David Bookbinder, the Washington legal director for the Sierra Club, which brought the suit with Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog organization.

The vice president's office had no immediate comment.

The suit asks Cheney, who convened a task force to formulate the administration's energy policy, to disclose documents that would show how the task force worked and who influenced it. The Sierra Club, in particular, suspects that oil and other energy executives played a big role in formulating the policy, which has been criticized for being lax on polluters and friendly to energy companies.

The Bush administration says that it is entitled to near-unassailable authority to make policy in private and that such privacy is necessary for candid discussions between the president and those who advise him.

The case boils down to the interpretation of a Watergate-era federal law governing the openness of government task forces. It says the work of federal employees must be publicized; the work of informal, nongovernment advisers can be secret.

No court has begun considering how the law might apply in this case because the Bush administration contends that merely forcing it to comply with requests for information would violate Cheney's right to secrecy.

A federal district court had ordered Cheney to turn over records, but he refused. When an appeals court agreed with the lower court, Cheney asked the Supreme Court to get involved.

The justices yesterday overruled the appeals court, saying it must consider the administration's concerns more carefully. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that while the president wasn't above the law, "the judiciary must afford presidential confidentiality the greatest possible protection."

In a sharp dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by David Souter, said the court of appeals was right to turn away the administration's procedural effort. Ginsburg wrote that the administration should have attempted to narrow the district court's broad order for documents if it thought it was too invasive.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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