The administration's opponents say the breadth of this argument calls into question long-settled assumptions about the ability of both Congress and the courts to conduct the necessary oversight of executive branch activities and ensure openness in government. "It is an extraordinary assertion of executive power and privilege," Thomas Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, one of the two plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said this week at a symposium on the case sponsored by the Federalist Society, the conservative legal policy organization.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act requires advisory committees to hold their meetings in public and to make their records publicly available. The Act doesn't apply to advisory groups that consist wholly of government employees, and Cheney maintains that his task force consisted solely of federal officials.

But in 1993, ruling in a suit seeking access to information about Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force, the federal appeals court here held that private citizens, through close participation, could be deemed "de facto members" of a committee and bring the committee within the law's coverage.

Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club believe that outsiders did, in fact, participate closely in Cheney's task force. They sued to find out, and the district court allowed them to take limited discovery to determine who participated in formulating the 150 recommendations that the task force made with regard to energy policy. The administration doesn't want to say who may have influenced those recommendations, and its argument, if accepted, would essentially prevent Congress from learning who outside of the government is influencing any of the federal committees that advise the President.

Judicial Watch calls the adminstration's argument a "startling bid for effective immunity from judicial process." Immunity from oversight and accountability is this administration's desire, both in this case and in the detention cases. The Supreme Court may start to wonder whether the Bush administration believes that the notion of checks and balances that underlies the Constitution applies to the executive branch of government at all.