Rahm Emanuel's attempt to defund Cheney defeated

Sadly, Rahm Emanuel's attempt to defund Dick Cheney's executive expenses (based on the logic that, hey, if he's not enough a part of the executive branch to be governed by executive branch regulations, he's not enough a part of it to receive funding, either) has gone down to defeat. From Reuters:

By a vote of 217-209, the House defeated legislation designed to rebuke Cheney for refusing, over objections by the National Archives, to comply with an executive order that set government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information.

Debate on the measure also gave Democrats another chance to mock Cheney's recent contention that he was exempt from the rule on executive-branch documents because he also serves as president of the Senate, part of legislative branch. He has since stepped back from that argument.

"The vice president must know that no matter what branch of government he may consider himself a part of on any given day or week, he is not above the law," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who wrote the amendment to a bill funding White House salaries and expenses next year.

Further needling Cheney, the amendment would have provided money for him to operate his office in the Senate while denying the nearly $5 million for running the vice president's office and home in Washington.

Heh. Anyway, although the voting was mostly along partisan lines, 24 Democrats voted against it. These Democratic Representatives must have felt that cutting the VP's funding was just something that Very Serious congresspeople shouldn't do, no matter how many times Dick Cheney makes a mockery of the concept of government oversight. Only two Republicans voted for the amendment. One of them, of course, was Ron Paul.