Washington ? The Supreme Court protected the Bush administration Thursday from having to reveal potentially embarrassing details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force until after the election, sending the case back to a lower court and noting a “paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation.”

The justices voted 7-2 to have an appeals court decide whether a federal open government law could be used to compel the administration to publicly release task force documents, dragging out an already 3-year-old fight over the records.

In the Cheney case, two groups that sued to get access to the task force documents argued the public had a right to know whether energy company executives played a key role in crafting the industry-friendly recommendations.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that a federal district court judge who ruled against the Bush administration demanded the opening of too much task force information and that the president and his executives were not given appropriate deference.

While the case was about privacy, that issue has been largely overshadowed in the public eye by conflict-of-interest questions involving Justice Antonin Scalia. He refused to step aside after it was revealed he and Cheney took a hunting trip together shortly after the court agreed to hear the case. Scalia sided with the majority, though he made it clear he felt the court could have dismissed the lawsuit.

The ruling was an anticlimactic end — for now — to a case with the potential to be a major test of executive power. It brought up echoes of the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling that rejected President Nixon’s claim of executive privilege and ordered him to surrender secretly recorded White House tapes.

But Justice Kennedy said there was no comparison between the criminal subpoena requests in the Nixon case and the interest by outside groups in what went on at Cheney’s closed-door energy task force meetings.