Vice Dick Cheney And the Hijacking of the American Presidency

Chapter One A Man, a Planand Names Named By mid-April 2001, Dick Cheney had been vice president of the United States for less than three months. But he was already deeply involved in a series of secret meetings in his West Wing office. When more space was needed for these energy task force meetings, an employee on loan from the Energy Department would schedule the ornate Vice President's Ceremonial Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The aide would also send out an e-mail designating precisely who would be allowed to attend the meetings the vice president was chairing. The April 17 list was a short one. Dick Cheney had quietly cleared his schedule to meet with a friend from Texas. It's not likely that Dick Cheney knew at the time that Enron was collapsing. But Ken Lay knew. The Enron CEO knew that the company he built had more liabilities than assets, a grossly inflated book value, and earnings statements that had little to do with actual earnings. The last best hope for the Houston-based energy giant lay in the unregulated electricity markets out west. Enron's traders were gouging the California market, taking power plants off-line to create shortages, booking transmission lines for current that never moved, and shuttling electricity back and forth across state lines to circumvent price controls. Squeezed between what it cost them to buy power from Enron and what they could charge on the regulated retail market, one of the state's two largest utility companies had filed for bankruptcy and the other had signed on to a government bailout. California was in an energy crisis unlike anything it had ever experienced. Governor Gray Davis was pleading for rate caps that would provide relief for the state's devastated utility companies and the consumers enduring rolling brownouts and soaring utility bills. And Enron CEO Ken Lay was flying to Washington to talk to Dick Cheney. The vice president was waiting. Lay handed him a three-page memo outlining Enron's recommendations for the new national energy policy Cheney was developing. Most of what Enron asked for would be included in the report the vice president's National Energy Policy Development Group would release the following month. One of Lay's recommendations was urgent, because it related to the California energy market: "The administration should reject any attempt to reregulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps." The following day, George Skelton, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times's Sacramento bureau, got an unexpected call from a woman in the vice president's press office asking Skelton if he wanted to interview Dick Cheney. Skelton says he thought the call might be the beginning of a campaign to make some inroads in the state Al Gore had swept in 2000. But Cheney wanted to talk energy. That was fine with Skelton, because at that time energy was the biggest story in the state. Cheney wasn't the least bit tentative. "Price caps provide short-term relief for politicians," he said. "But they do nothing to deal with the basic, fundamental problem." Skelton pushed a little. Would the administration support temporary price caps to get the state through the summer? "Six months? Six years?" Cheney said. "Once politicians can no longer resist the temptation to go with price caps, they usually are unable to even muster the courage to end them . . . I don't see that as a possibility." California's governor, both U.S. senators, even Republicans in California's House delegation were begging the administration for price caps, or for some relief for utility rates that were forcing small-business owners to close their doors. But Cheney had already told Senator DianneDuBose, Lou is the author of 'Vice Dick Cheney And the Hijacking of the American Presidency', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400065769 and ISBN 1400065763.