Congress reduces its oversight role

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Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:56:26 EST

Congress reduces its oversight role

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Congress reduces its oversight role

Since Clinton, a change in focus

 

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff | November 20, 2005

 

 

 

WASHINGTON -- 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.

 

The jarring comparison reflects the way Congress has conducted its

oversight role during the GOP's era of one-party rule in Washington.

 

While congressional committees once were leaders in investigating the

executive branch and powerful industries, the current Congress has

largely spared major corporations and has done only minimal oversight

of the Republican administration, according to a review of

congressional documents by The Boston Globe.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Across the House, panels that once aggressively scrutinized the

workings of the government are now restricting themselves largely to

subjects that advance a particular goal or a cause favored by the GOP

leadership, such as recent oversight hearings on the benefits of

having social services provided by faith-based organizations and

drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose Reagan

administration-era investigation into reports of mismanagement at the

Environmental Protection Agency led to the resignation of the EPA

administrator, Anne Gorsuch Burford, has also become far less

aggressive in its investigations of energy interests and the

administration.

 

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.

 

Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who is now chairman of

the Republican panel, said it was natural that opposing Democrats

would want to be tougher on the Bush administration, as he said the

GOP was on Clinton. But he acknowledged that ''Republicans in general

have not emphasized oversight in the way that Mr. Dingell did. "

 

At a time when the Bush administration is under scrutiny from a

special counsel inquiry, the lack of action by Congress appears to be

especially striking. Senate Democrats invoked an obscure rule to force

the body into a closed session and embarrass the Republicans into

jump-starting an investigation into accusations that pre-Iraq War

intelligence had been politicized.

 

''I'm not sure they're stepping up to the plate on the more pressing

issues of the time, " former representative William F. Clinger, a

Pennsylvania Republican, said of his party's leaders.

 

When the GOP was in the minority, Clinger fought unsuccessfully to

reserve the panel's chairmanship for the party opposite of the sitting

president, to encourage more aggressive oversight. The proposal was

opposed by the Democrats, and was dropped by the GOP once it took over

control of the House.

 

''Congress has enormous power and it does nothing, " said Frank Silbey,

a former investigator for the Senate Labor Committee under both

parties. ''It is absolutely the worst situation I have ever seen in my

life. Congress shows no inclination to expand the public's right to

know. That's one of the reasons for government oversight. "

 

Controversies such as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction

in Iraq, abuses at US detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay and

Abu Ghraib prisons, and the revealing of former CIA operative Valerie

Plame Wilson's name have gone largely unscrutinized on Capitol Hill.

 

Instead, congressional committees have directed oversight at such

topics as steroid abuses in sports and ''diploma mill " universities --

topics critics say are worthy, but which do not fulfill Congress's

responsibility to be a check on the executive branch.

 

Further, some of the recent hearings defined as oversight by panel

leadership in fact served to advance a Bush administration agenda. In

addition to the hearings into faith-based service providers and

drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, House and Senate

panels have sought to expose the dangers of buying imported or

pharmaceuticals sold on the Internet, buttressing a Republican and

drug-industry position that Americans should not be permitted to buy

cut-rate prescription drugs outside the United States.

 

Davis said the inquiry topics were worthy, and noted that the

committee agenda -- which must be spelled out at the start of each

session -- had been approved unanimously by the committee, including

Democrats on the panel.

 

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.

 

''When Clinton was in office, there wasn't an issue too small to hold

a hearing on and embarrass the Democrats, " said Representative Henry

A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform

Committee. ''Now, there isn't a scandal big enough to ignore. "

 

Lawmakers in both parties said that the oversight process has become

very partisan.

 

Investigative staffs that once worked together on inquiries now

operate separately, and the two parties have battled over the access

to documents, the witnesses to call, and the matters to investigate.

 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Energy and Commerce Committee was one of

the most feared investigatory committees in Congress, conducting

hearings into such matters as climate change, misuse of military

funds, and mismanagement of the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program.

The latter inquiry forced the resignation of two EPA officials and the

conviction of one on perjury charges.

 

An inquiry into enforcement of laws against environmental crimes

continued into the Clinton administration, and the panel, under

Dingell, did not spare its party's president, chastising the Clinton

Justice Department for being uncooperative in the investigation.

 

''We believed we had something to do, to [assure] that public money

was being spent appropriately, that laws were being enforced, and we

did. Our country was better for it, " Dingell said. But now,

''everything seems to be run out of the White House. "

 

The Energy and Commerce panel has not conducted aggressive inquiries

into powerful industries under its jurisdiction such as oil, gas, and

tobacco companies, Dingell and others have said.

 

Nor has the panel done a comprehensive inquiry into Vice President

Dick Cheney's energy task force, which played a critical role in

giving tax breaks to a number of oil, gas, and nuclear companies.

 

Government watchdogs want to know how much influence the industry had

in developing the legislation.

 

Meanwhile, Republican leaders are reported to have hindered the

Democrats' efforts to investigate Bush administration activities, and

have balked at giving the Democrats a room in which they can interview

witnesses.

 

Republican leaders are also seeking to reverse a law that allows any

group of seven House members to demand documents without the approval

of the majority party.

 

Since the minority party does not have subpoena power, the law is one

of the few tools Democrats have to influence investigations.

 

Government watchdog groups say that just a few lawmakers -- Republican

senators Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and John McCain of Arizona, and

Waxman, Government Reform's senior Democrat -- have pushed for

investigations of politically sensitive issues. Grassley took on both

the pharmaceutical lobby and the Bush administration when he held

hearings on prescription drug safety and the FDA's relationship with

the companies that manufacture them.

 

McCain, who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, has led

hearings into the activities of a prominent Republican lobbyist, Jack

Abramoff.

 

While the Senate has been somewhat more assertive in conducting

investigations, the Senate's major investigatory panel, the Committee

on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has focused largely on

its homeland security mission and has not done much oversight of the

Bush administration, said Peter Stockton, a congressional investigator

who heads the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.

 

The Senate panel has held hearings on Pentagon waste of unused airline

tickets, the danger of purchasing pharmaceuticals over the Internet,

and civilian contractors who cheat on their taxes. But like its House

counterpart, the committee has failed to investigate larger matters

such as the failed search for weapons of mass destruction, or the case

of a government actuary who said he was asked not to reveal

information showing that the 2003 Medicare prescription drug package

would cost much more than the administration told Congress.

 

''They're clearly not doing the big stuff, " Stockton said.

 

Waxman, who held his own unofficial hearing into Iraq contracting, has

been rebuffed in his efforts to conduct bipartisan investigations on a

number of topics that involve members of the administration and

powerful industries. The rejected list includes: the administration

role, if any, in condoning detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

Bay, the use of government funds for ''covert propaganda " in the

media, the politicization of science policy, government secrecy,

industry influence in rule-making at the Environmental Protection

Agency, the decline of FDA enforcement against drug companies, and the

case of naming Plame Wilson, the CIA operative.

 

None of those recommendations made it into the Government Reform

panel's oversight plan for the current Congress -- a document it must

file every two years. Instead, the 140 approved oversight topics

feature such bureaucratic matters as ''the activities of the Bureau of

Economic Analysis " and ''the government's migration to Internet

Protocol version IPv6. "

 

Under pressure, the Government Reform Committee did hold four hearings

in the last Congress on contracting for Iraqi reconstruction. But

critics say the panel was mostly interested in exonerating

Halliburton, Cheney's former firm, accused of overcharging the

government in its contracts. The final report dismissed critical

witnesses as ''so-called whistle-blowers " and attributed

reconstruction mishaps to ''the fog of war. "

 

While GOP lawmakers said the hearings were an exhaustive review of

Halliburton's activities, Democrats conducted their own, unofficial

inquiry and disclosed documents and information not revealed at the

House hearings.

 

''It appeared to me that the House hearings were called in order to

defend Halliburton, which is a pretty pathetic way to do investigative

oversight, " said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who

led shadow hearings. ''To the extent that the Republican-controlled

Congress has done any oversight at all, it has largely been done to

support Halliburton and to allege that anyone looking into these

things has been partisan. "

 

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.

 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/11/20/congress_reduce\

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*****

" Sarah, if the people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes

have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and

lynched. "

George H.W. Bush

speaking in an interview with reporter Sarah McClendon in Dec. 1992

 

***