If you want the usual staid “Vice President dies” obituary, read John D. McKinnon’s in The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+):

Dick Cheney, who served four Republican presidents and whose role as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror made him one of the most powerful—and controversial—U.S. vice presidents in history, died. He was 84.

If you’d prefer something that offers a less rose-colored perspective of Cheney’s impact, I suggest Spencer Ackerman’s contemptuous piece for The Nation, the headline for which is “His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies”:

Cheney, 84, picked an appropriate time to die. His decades-long struggle to consolidate the unparalleled might of US warmaking within the White House has succeeded. “In Cheney’s view,” wrote his biographer Barton Gellman, “the president’s authority was close to absolute within his rightful sphere.” Cheney defined that sphere expansively and fought for his definitions aggressively.

On Cheney’s unrelenting pursuit to create “an architecture of repression”:

Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist No. 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the unitary executive theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back.

Cheney got us into a war that convinced a generation of Americans that Muslims and the Middle East were America’s enemies.

We have a weak and ineffectual Congress today because Cheney sidelined it two decades ago.

There is a direct line between Dick Cheney’s unwavering belief in the plenary power of the president, and Donald Trump’s seemingly unchecked attempts to wield that power today.

We have Donald Trump because we had Dick Cheney.