Nine Tough Questions for Congress

Russell Senate Office Building was the scene of many troubling moments: The Teapot Dome scandal, The Army-McCarthy hearings, The Watergate hearings...


From MotherJones
September 01 , 2006
James Ridgeway

But in the past six years, congressional investigations of such bold, searching nature have disappeared. In a post-9/11 environment of silence and fear, the mood inside Congress has mirrored the bunkers and barriers outside: No one dares question the military or the intelligence services too closely, or to push the president too far. The Caucus Room continues to be used for party meetings and social events, and every so often there is a potted inquiry, as in the case of the 2003 hearings on the space shuttle. But on issues of war and peace, of corruption and graft, of civil rights, civil liberties, and constitutional breaches, meek questions are the rule, answered by dull assurances from the White House.

If the Democrats win back control of Congress (or even one of its chambers), if they can come up with the requisite moxie, and if they can muster the political will to reach out to their own base as well as to disaffected Republicans, they will have an opportunity to begin to change all that. They will need to overcome the myriad obstacles the Bush administration has created to keep lawmakers from obtaining and releasing critical information, such as its resistance to briefing congressional committees on intelligence issues, or its heavy hand in redacting congressional reports.

[...]

A Democratic majority in the Senate could, for example, place the chairmanship of the intelligence committee in the hands of Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who has largely been stymied in his efforts to spur a thorough investigation of the Niger forgeries and what he suspects may be a broader campaign of deception. Among other things, such an inquiry could lead straight to the Pentagon's shadowy Office of Special Plans; under gop leadership, no one is too eager to learn much about this office, which led the prewar intelligence cherry-picking, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) is holding up an inquiry.

Regardless of the election result in November, a few independent-minded Republicans in key positions offer hope that important investigations may gain traction. Under Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), the national security subcommittee of the powerful House Committee on Government Reform has actually summoned the mettle to subpoena Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in its investigation of the chain of command in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case.

But if lawmakers of either party do not begin to reclaim their constitutional powers—by asking questions such as those listed below—it's not hard to envision a time when visitors may come to the venerable Caucus Room as if to a museum, to learn about a bygone era when congressional investigations still served as a check on the imperial presidency.

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