Charlie Savage Quotes

By the seventh year of the Bush-Cheney presidency, Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills enacted since he took office, challenging the constitutionality of well over 1,100 separate sections in the legislation. By contrast, all previous presidents in American history combined had used signing statements to challenge the constitutionality of about 600 sections of bills, according to historical data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who was one of the first to study signing statements.

According to James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, once a year in the 1980s, the Reagan administration flew Cheney to a secret bunker to practice rebuilding the government if the Soviets destroyed Washington. Cheney's role, Mann reported, was to use his White House chief of staff experience to run the government in the name of any surviving cabinet member who made it to the bunker. The Reagan plan ignored the Presidential Succession Act, a 1947 law that put two top congressional leaders higher in the line of succession than cabinet secretaries. The program also made no plan for reconstituting Congress, because "it would be easier to operate without them," a participant told Mann.

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.