Text 6. Congress’s InvestigatIVE Oversight Role

As legislating in the modern world has become more complex, there has been greater need for professional assistance and for legislative work to be done by committees. Proposals for legislation, budgets, approval of Presidential appointments, and all manner of other legislative business must generally survive intensive committee scrutiny before it can be brought forward for a vote on the floor. And on the floor, the relevant committee’s recommendations have weight among busy members of Congress who may be only vaguely aware of the details of much legislation outside their areas of concern and expertise. There are now 298 standing, special, and select committees and subcommittees. The subject matters of some of the more important standing committees that both houses of Congress have are agriculture, appropriations, armed services, banking, education, energy, foreign affairs, governmental operations, judiciary labor, small business, and science and technology. Within each committee are standing subcommittees devoted to particular areas.

The original purpose of committees and Congressional agencies was to deal with the increased complexity and specialized nature of legislation in the modern world. But with the changing nature of the legislation and the growth of administrative agencies, committees have taken on the more general Task of overseeing the operations of government.

President Woodrow Wilson, before he became President, remarked on the importance of Congress’s role in overseeing government and exposing inadequacies, noting that the “informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.” Committee investigative hearings are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, but the connection to Congress’s legislative power that investigations have is that they are undertaken to determine whether there is a need for legislation. On this basis the Court has upheld Congress’s right to investigate, including the power to issue subpoenas and to punish disregard of those subpoenas as a “contempt of Congress”. However, for some committee hearings in recent years, the legislative agenda potentially involved has not always been obvious. The fact that the investigators are politicians and there is often intense press and television coverage of the hearings has caused many such investigations to take on a life of their own. The primary product of many such committee investigations is publicity, but that is all to the good if the investigations create greater public awareness of the shortcomings of the government and its officials.

Investigations can take on political overtones and the more political congressional investigations are, the more controversial they are. Some such investigations have had laudatory results, but others have not. The Senate committee investigation of the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to President’s Nixon resignation, is placed by most in the positive category. In that scandal, the Senate committee in 1974 began investigating to see if officials at the highest levels of the Republican White House were involved in and later tried to cover up a burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters. Ultimately, the incriminating evidence was laid out on national television and the President, who had denied any involvement, resigned in disgrace. Perhaps the most widely known abuse of the committee investigatory process involved the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who chaired a committee in a 1954 investigation of “Communists” allegedly working in the Army and the State Department. No substantial evidence was ever produced, but the accusations of McCarthy, assisted by a brewing anti-Communist hysteria in the country at the time, cost hundreds of people their reputations and careers. For better or for worse, the Congressional investigatory power is well established and has become a real force in government.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 630