WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will intervene in a dispute between Vice President Cheney and two nonprofit organizations seeking information about the internal operations of the controversial White House energy policy task force he headed in 2001.
Setting up a high-stakes clash at the court over the Bush administration’s tightlipped approach to information, the court granted Cheney’s request to review a lower court’s order requiring him to show some of the material to the groups.
A petition on Cheney’s behalf filed by Solicitor General Theodore Olson said the lower court’s order involves "fundamental separation-of-powers questions" and threatens to "generate the kind of intrusions into the Executive Branch that this Court has sought to avoid."
The court’s action was a blow to the organizations — Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group — seeking access to task force documents. The Sierra Club’s brief told the justices that the White House was stalling and that the Supreme Court should not help it by hearing his case.
"By the time the court decides this (July or sooner) it will be two years of complete stoppage that they’ve won," said Alan Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, who represents the Sierra Club. "In that sense, they’ve succeeded."
The task force, known officially as the National Energy Policy Development Group and made up of several Cabinet officers and White House aides, was set up Jan. 29, 2001, and issued its report in May that year. The report included recommendations favored by industry.
The lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club claim that lobbyists were so close to the energy task force that they were de facto members of it. As a result, the groups argue, the task force is subject to the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a federal law that requires policy-development committees that consist at least in part of nongovernmental personnel to be balanced and open.
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