The lawsuit doesn’t concern anything Cheney has actually done– like, for example, not produce White House emails. Instead, CREW and the others are trying to make sure that Cheney doesn’t  use his claim that his office is not part of the executive branch as a reason to withhold his VP records.

Back in 2001, President George W. Bush released an executive order that lays out his views on executive power. Compared with the rest of the document, the section on vice presidential records seems innocuous: “the presidential records act applies to the executive records of the vice president.”

The 1978 Presidential Records Act makes clear that the president and vice president must give the National Archives all policy-related documents when their administration ends.

The problem, say the lawsuit’s plantiffs, is that Cheney has already spurned the National Archives by claiming he’s not part of the executive branch. And Bush’s executive order refers to the vice president’s “executive records.”

So what if Cheney claims that administration-defining documents — the lawsuit specifically cites notes and records on Iraq and energy policy — are actually “legislative records”?

Filing a lawsuit for Cheney’s complete records while he is still the sitting VP is a unique strategy.

Then again, according to the White House, the “vice presidency is a unique office, neither part of the executive branch nor the legislative branch, but it is attached by the Constitution to the latter.”

Judicial intervention could both preserve Cheney’s records and finally do away with his claim to be floating somewhere above the Constitution.

No? Well, allow me to refresh your memory:

Funny story. It turns out there’s a very good reason Bounds couldn’t come up with an example — there isn’t one!

The Anchorage Daily News reports the commander of the Alaska National Guard sides with Brown on this one:

[T]he governor has no command authority overseas or anywhere in the United States other than Alaska, said Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell, the service commander of the Alaska National Guard.

“When members of the National Guard are federalized, they work for the president,” Campbell said Wednesday. “It’s not just overseas. They could be federalized to go to other states or they could even be federalized in the state.”

OK, but surely she must have issued some sort of directive within Alaska — a natural disaster perhaps?

No, Campbell said. The governor has granted him the authority to act on his own in most cases, including life-or-death emergencies — when a quick response is required — and minor day-to-day operations.

“Some authorities have been given to me that she has acknowledged that I can execute,” he said. “For others I have to ask her each time.”

The recent decision to deploy a C-17 cargo plane from the Alaska Air National Guard to Louisiana to assist during the Hurricane Gustav response was an occasion in which Campbell briefed the governor’s office and sought its approval, he said. Chief of Staff Mike Nizich signed off on it.

The flooding that occurred in Fairbanks in late July — for which the guard sent trucks north to provide clean drinking water — didn’t require the governor’s approval, Campbell said.

So it seems the “soul mates” on the GOP ticket have something else in common: a predisposition to cede their command authority to the military leaders on the groud. Why not just elect Gen. David Petraeus president and cut out the middleman?