WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear Vice President Dick Cheney's argument for keeping private the details of closed-door White House strategy sessions that produced the administration's energy policy, a dispute that tests the limits of White House secrecy.

The case is part of the administration's wide legal effort to strengthen the powers of the presidency, and will be the Supreme Court's closest look at presidential secrecy since the Paula Jones scandal during the Clinton administration.

Cheney in particular has criticized what he called a diminution of presidential power over the past three decades.

"Legislative power and judicial power cannot extend to compelling the vice president to disclose ... the details of the process by which a president obtains information and advice from the vice president," the government argued in a Supreme Court filing.

The case concerns meetings of a White House task force assembled by Cheney, a former chief executive of the energy and construction firm Halliburton Co., and allegations that energy industry executives and lobbyists were in on the meetings while environmentalists were shut out.

The panel met for several months in 2001 and issued a report that favored opening more public lands to oil and gas drilling and proposed a range of other steps supported by industry.

The government watchdog group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, an environmental group, sued to force the White House to reveal how the task force operated and who participated.

The suit alleged that former Enron chief Kenneth Lay, former lobbyist Haley Barbour and other outsiders regularly sat in on the meetings and functioned as members of the task force.

The White House has acknowledged contacts with Lay, but insists that the task force was entirely made up of government officials.

The administration has argued that the constitutional need for the president to receive candid advice demands confidentiality. If the lawsuit is successful, the administration says, advisers may be reluctant to talk for fear their comments will become public.

Claims of a constitutional conflict are overblown, and the government is merely delaying, lawyers for Judicial Watch told the high court.

"This transparent strategy of running out the clock should not be tolerated," they said.

If the Supreme Court rules against the government, the case would return to a lower federal court for a preliminary fact-finding process called discovery. Although the government could still fight release of specific information at that stage, it is asking for blanket immunity ahead of time, Sierra Club and Judicial Watch lawyers argued.

"We're hoping at the end of this process the court is going to remind the vice president that he's not above the law," said Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder.

"The Supreme Court has laid to rest that kind of imperial presidency" in cases dating to the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, Bookbinder said.

The Supreme Court forced Nixon to turn over White House tapes in 1974, and allowed Paula Jones to pursue her sexual harassment claim against a sitting president in 1997.

The Watergate and Whitewater-era court fights ought to be an object lesson for the White House now, presidential historian and biographer Robert Dallek said Monday.

"If there is suspicion of wrongdoing or any strong indications that there may be wrongdoing then the courts are obliged to compel the opening of these materials," Dallek said.

By carrying the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, the White House risks perpetuating the suspicion that it has something to hide, Dallek said.

"You'd think they might want to push aside any appearance of impropriety."

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the case tests "issues critical to the effective functioning of the presidency."

"It is important that the president's constitutional authority to gather candid advice from his advisers be respected," Corallo said Monday. "To allow further discovery into the advice provided by the president's closest advisers would upset the ability of the president and vice president to effectively develop strong national policy."

The administration lost two rounds in federal court before appealing to the Supreme Court. A lower federal judge had ordered the White House and other government agencies to turn over records that Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club could then use to press their case.

Federal agencies have disclosed 39,000 pages of internal documents related to the work of Cheney's energy task force, but the task force itself has turned over no materials.

Among the proposals in the Cheney energy plan: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat. Neither idea has been adopted.

The case is Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 03-475.