Beyond the Dome

After eight years of watching Vice President Dick Cheney expand the power of the vice presidency and reject the authority of Congress, lawmakers will be keenly interested in knowing whether the next vice president would be more open to negotiation and allowing congressional oversight.

In the case of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the closest parallel is the way she has dealt with the Legislature. Even a vice president is going to have to deal with Congress at some point, so it’s a good idea to figure out whether they respect the role of the legislative branch. Palin’s tenure has been short, and the details of her record are still coming to light. But already, there are signs that she hasn’t treated the Legislature as a full partner in government.

She has worked with the Democratic minority, state lawmakers say, mainly to pass legislation that the majority Republicans didn’t support, such as measures to raise oil taxes and build a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope oil fields. And she has earned exactly the reputation for independence that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his allies claim she has.

The down side of that independence, though, has been poor communication with Republican lawmakers who say they would have liked to work with her more closely.

“The governor is very independent, and does not interact with the Legislature very well unless she thinks she needs them,” said Alaska House Speaker John Harris. “It’s hard to have a group conversation with the governor and her staff and get them to listen.” Harris insists he’s a McCain backer and supports Palin’s bid for the vice presidency, but “I’m just trying to be honest with you.”

As a consequence, lawmakers often end up being surprised by what spending items she cuts through the line-item veto, according to state Sen. Bert Stedman, co-chairman of the Finance Committee and the author of the state’s capital budgets.

“Even when we were going through the process, we couldn’t get the administration to take positions on bills that were before the committee,” Stedman said. If he knew in advance what items Palin objected to, he said, he would simply take them out. Instead, he said, the vetoes “give the opportunity for the governor to say, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative, look at my vetoes.”

As for the role of oversight by the Legislature, when I asked Harris whether Palin has been open to it, he had a good laugh. “The answer is no,” Harris said. “The governor is not one who likes to be questioned.”

And Stedman, for his part, said the line-item vetoes have appeared to be “targeted at people who didn’t agree with her political viewpoint.”

Even Palin’s defenders will only go so far in speaking up for her. When I contacted the McCain campaign for a response to Harris and Stedman’s comments, they suggested I talk to Rep. John Coghill, clearly thinking he would have a different view of her record. He did, but he wasn’t exactly a fire-breathing surrogate.

Coghill didn’t deny that Palin has fought with the Legislature, but he attributes the tensions to the normal separation-of-powers fights that governors and legislatures usually have. He said Palin has actually been good about communicating what she wants — but he allowed that she often does so publicly, through the press, rather than through more traditional methods such as speaking to caucus meetings and meeting with lawmakers privately. He believes she hasn’t given more notice about specific vetoes because she doesn’t want them to be seen as threatening lawmakers.

And Coghill says Palin has respected the role of the Legislature, and has just been unusually vocal about her disagreements with the leadership. “She saw what she thought was the right thing to do, and she did it,” Coghill said. “I will say she didn’t do it very tactfully.”

Of course, there’s a difference between a governor who just fights with lawmakers sometimes and one who doesn’t think the executive branch needs to bother listening to the legislative branch at all. Still, Harris says there is a side of Palin that dismisses the importance of the Legislature: “Many people, Democrats and Republicans alike, have seen that her style is, ‘This is the way to do it. Let’s just do it.’ “

And there is one area where Palin is rejecting lawmakers’ oversight authority. Her lawyer has now asked the state personnel board to investigate her role in the firing of the public safety commissioner — and asked the Legislature to drop its own investigation. Palin’s lawyer says it’s the board, not the Legislature, that has jurisdiction over ethics. It’s not exactly the sign of a vice president who would make Congress’ oversight job easy.