Has the GOP Congress finally started to wake up?
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports Sunday that the drip, drip, drip of press reports about questionable Bush administration practices might finally be stirring some action on the hill.
Lawmakers have been caught by surprise by several recent reports, including the existence of secret U.S. prisons abroad, the CIA's detention overseas of innocent foreign nationals, and, last week, the discovery that the military has been engaged in domestic spying. After five years in which the GOP-controlled House and Senate undertook few investigations into the administration's activities, the legislative branch has begun to complain about being in the dark.
(Pause a moment, blogophiles, and acknowledge that as much as you all might rail against the MSM, they deserve credit for ferreting out this stuff.)
The highlight of the article comes from Tom Davis:
In an interview last week, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said "it's a fair comment" that the GOP-controlled Congress has done insufficient oversight and "ought to be" doing more."Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own," said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. "I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches."
This is a different tune that Davis sang last month in a devastating report by The Boston Globe’s Susan Milligan on the full extent to which Congress has fallen down on the job.
Representative Tom Davis, the current chairman of the Government Reform Committee, the chamber's chief watchdog for government waste and abuse, said his panel had not abdicated its oversight role, which many consider critical to the separation of powers in government.''What aren't we doing? We aren't going after the mini scandal du jour, to try to embarrass the administration on a hearing that's going nowhere," said Davis, Republican of Virginia.
If you haven’t seen it, the Globe piece is a certifiable Must Read. It’s chock full of damning statistics and observations that put the lie to Davis’ November statement. To wit:
Back in the mid-1990s, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, aggressively delving into alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration, logged 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether former president Bill Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to identify potential Democratic donors.
In the past two years, a House committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
And:
An examination of committees' own reports found that the House Government Reform Committee held just 37 hearings described as ''oversight" or investigative in nature during the last Congress, down from 135 such hearings held by its predecessor, the House Government Operations Committee, in 1993-94, the last year the Democrats controlled the chamber.
Party loyalty does not account for the difference: In 1993-94, the Democrats were investigating a Democratic administration.
Or:
In 1993-1994, under the chairmanship of Democrat John D. Dingell of Michigan, the panel's oversight efforts accounted for 117 pages in its activities report for the session, compared with 24 pages in the last Congress. The committee in 1993-1994 held 153 investigative hearings, compared with 129 during 2003-2004, and the more recent hearings have not targeted the Bush administration.
But the agenda was different during the Clinton administration. The government reform panel alone, for example, issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.
The panel received more than 2 million pages of documents and heard from 44 Clinton administration officials, including two White House chiefs of staff, according to statistics culled by Democratic staff on the Government Reform Committee.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found that from October 1996 to March 1998 -- well before the impeachment hearings -- the Clinton White House staff had spent more than 55,000 hours responding to more than 300 congressional requests, and had produced hundreds of video and audio tapes, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, to congressional investigators.
Contrast that with:
At a House Armed Services Committee meeting last year, some Democrats and a Republican requested access to the scores of separate executive branch documents and reports on the Abu Ghraib episode. But the panel's chairman, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, refused to request the documents, saying the rest of the committee should first read the Army's entire 6000-page report on the matter, according to a transcript of the meeting provided to the Globe.''The idea that we're going to send a message back now, that somehow we have been stonewalled when they sent us 6,000 [pages] and only four members of the committee have had the time to read them so far, does not make sense," Hunter said. He then said the panel should focus on other issues, such as Korea and China.
(I guess the GOP decided some time around January, 2001 that pesky inquiries might slow down White House productivity?)
So how seriously will the GOP now start taking its oversight role? Stay tuned ... but don’t hold your breath waiting for results. (See: Cornyn, John.)