Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a decision today rejecting the Justice Department's "constantly shifting arguments" in defense of Dick Cheney's narrow interpretation of the vice president's obligation to comply with the Presidential Records Act. The Justice Department argued that the vice president has complete and unreviewable authority to decide how to comply with the Act, that the Act did not apply to the vice president in any event since the vice president is not part of the executive branch but is an "appendage" of Congress (sort of a cancerous growth, in Cheney's case), and that the historians who sued to seek the law's enforcement lacked standing. Wrong on all counts.

What sounds like a victory may turn out to be hollow when historians finally gain access to Cheney's records. Judge Kollar-Kotelly decided that the promise of Claire O'Donnell, "a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks," to transfer Cheney's records to the National Archives in good faith, made court-imposed relief unnecessary.

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