From David Kurtz’s great catch at TPM, we learn of the Plum Book, a government directory. Kurtz quotes Yet Another Whack Constitutional Theory from the Plum Book, but this excerpt caught my eye instead. Perhaps, as Xan fervently hopes, there’s a way to drag Cheney’s pale, bloating, undead body out into the light:

The Office of the Vice President (OVP) consists of the aggregation of Vice Presidential employees whose salary is disbursed by the Secretary of the Senate from the Vice President’s legislative appropriation, Vice Presidential employees employed with the Vice President’s executive appropriation, employees assigned or detailed to the Vice President, and consultants engaged by the Vice President.

One has to wonder whether the change of power in D.C. has affected Big Dick’s money flow. So far as I can tell from this rawther opaque paragraph, all Cheney’s funding comes from the Secretary of the Senate (once a Republican, now a Democrat), or from the “executive appropriation,” which is granted by the House Appropriations Committee (David Obey, chair), and the Subcommmittee of Financial Services (José Serrano, chair).

In either case, Congress could use the power of the purse to find out what the OVP’s org chart really is. To me, thinking back to the good ol’ days or Iran-Contra, the OVP looks like a “covert, off-the-shelf” government-within-a-government, so it would be interesting to know if there were, say, extra-constitutional sources of funds.

It would also be interesting to find out who those “consultants” (mercenaries?) are, and how they are funded. I wonder if any of them worked for the White House Iraq Group, planting stories in the press, or helping to out Valerie Plame?

NOTE Currently, the Secretary of the Senate is former Daschle staffer Nancy Erickson. Previously, the Secretary was Frist’s chief of staff, Emily J. Reynolds. Reynolds treated this supposedly non-partisan position as we would expect any Republican to do: she made it partisan.)

or from Cheney’s “executive appropriation,”