The Washington Post published the second installment of a four-part series about US Vice President Dick Cheney. The title of the second chapter is “Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power,” and provides some insight into how Dick Cheney encouraged the executive to adopt a quite radical theory of executive power. At the very start of the installment, the two authors write: “The vice president’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.”

More:

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden “torture” and permitted use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress — for both Cheney’s claims of executive supremacy and his unyielding defense of what he called “robust interrogation.”

But a more careful look at the results suggests that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many of the harsh measures he championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.

James A. Baker had the following to say about Dick Cheney: “Once he’s taken a position, I think that’s it. He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power.”

It is yet another long read, but well worth it.