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Worst Week in Washington The Fix’s
Chris Cillizza is away, so no one will win this week’s title. Congrats, or something.
Congress has forgotten how to investigate C
by Raymond Smock and Roger Bruns
ongress has hosted no shortage of public floggings this year. BP chief executive Tony Hayward faced hostile questions about his company’s responsibility for
the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Toyota’s Akio Toyoda tried to explain sticking gas pedals. And Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein was grilled on his firm’s role in the financial disaster. But it would be a mistake to conclude from these public spectacles that Congress is aggressively wielding its investigative and oversight powers. Quite the contrary. Prominent hearings by standing committees provide lawmakers a soapbox, creating the appearance of congressional action. But without the hard follow-up work of investigations that lead to real reform, many of the nation’s most pressing problems remain unresolved.
Congress used to know how to
investigate. In response to events ranging from war profiteering to Wall Street excesses to espionage transgressions, Congress formed special committees. Directed by powerful lawmakers, well-staffed and armed with subpoena power, these panels provided the public valuable information about government activities and spurred important legislation. Increasingly, though, Congress’s impulse has been to outsource this job to independent commissions, which have proliferated in the decades since the Warren Commission investigated President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Today, when faced with a crisis, Congress — or the president — appoints a commission, waits for its report and then, most of the time, files it away to obscurity. Making matters worse, since commissions don’t command the respect that members of Congress receive, they often have trouble acquiring evidence and find federal agencies uncooperative. As 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton recalled in 2006: “We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people. We knew the history of commissions . . . nobody paid much attention to ’em. So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail.”
And still, the commissions keep
coming. (See, for example, the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission.) As it happens, three of the most
effective congressional investigations ever convened addressed issues that are once again in the headlines. Although they date back several decades, the conclusions of the probes seem prescient. And they show what Congress can accomplish when it puts its institutional muscle to the task.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Sen. Harry S. Truman and members of his investigating committee visited Ford in 1942 as part of their efforts to hold defense contractors accountable.
The Truman Committee As Germany drove through Europe in
the late 1930s, the United States began an unprecedented arms buildup, award- ing billions of dollars in defense con- tracts. But by 1941, rumors suggested misuse of funds, lax oversight and fraud. Harry S. Truman, then a little- known senator, went on a crusade to uncover such abuses, touring military bases and defense installations and de- manding to see important documents. To his disgust, he found that many of the rumors had substance — and that the situation threatened the nation’s ability to mobilize for war. In 1941, the Senate created a special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. With Truman as its chairman, the panel held hundreds of hearings and traveled to defense man- ufacturing sites across the country. As
HLG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
At a 1975 hearing into intelligence agency abuses, Sen. Frank Church held a CIA tranquilizer dart gun. Panel co-chairman Sen. John Tower looked on.
The Church Committee
a result, the government began to hold defense contractors accountable for cost overruns, criminal misdeeds and unsatisfactory work. It is estimated that the committee saved the government as much as $15 billion (in World War II dollars) over the course of the war and saved the lives of many soldiers who would otherwise have been armed with defective weapons, machineryand gear. In December 2006, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, calling the corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan war contracting “staggering” and “breathtaking,” told reporters that the country needed something similar to the Truman Com- mittee. There remains a desperate need for such oversight today. A committee with the power to conduct a far-ranging investigation would let contractors know that someone is watching.
Responding to revelations in the press regarding abuses by several fed- eral intelligence agencies, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) in 1975 launched a congressional probe. Early in the com- mittee’s televised hearings, he dramat- ically held up a CIA dart gun designed to shoot tranquilizers. The committee revealed that the CIA possessed shell- fish toxin, cobra venom and other poi- sons in violation of a 1970 presidential order to destroy all biological weapons. That was just the beginning. Over
the next nine months, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 250 executive and 21 public hearings. In the process it discovered widespread abuses by the nation’s in- telligence agencies, which had illegally spied on union chiefs, civil rights lead- ers, journalists, members of Congress,
Supreme Court justices and even Elea- nor Roosevelt. The committee’s reports resulted in the creation of the permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which established a court to issue warrants for domestic wiretapping. Illegal wiretapping and other abuses by intelligence agencies and the exec- utive branch in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks have offered plenty of fodder for television pundits, but they should have been subjected to congressional scrutiny. A serious in- vestigation could have led to new laws needed to govern the post-9/11 land- scape.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010
The Pecora Committee
In late 1932, the Senate Banking and Currency Committee hired former New York City prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora as chief counsel for a major in- vestigation of the financial system fail- ures that led to the Great Depression. The Sicilian-born, cigar-smoking Peco- ra had a photographic memory, an in- tricate understanding of the maze of schemes and machinations entangling the nation’s banking system, and a flair for confronting witnesses with uncom- fortable facts. In one of the hearings’ highlights,
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In 1933, Ferdinand Pecora, left, helped Congress investigate the causes of the Great Depression. His questioning of bankers such as J.P. Morgan, right, was notorious.
Pecora methodically led banking titan J.P. Morgan Jr. down an inquisitorial path that resulted in the financier’s ad- missions that he had not been paying income taxes and that his company
had distributed financial favors to in- fluential individuals. Pecora’s work led to resignations of
bank executives, but more important, it provided the factual base — and the congressional motivation — for the Se- curities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which added oversight and protection against bank- ing abuses, and the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment bank- ing from government-insured com- mercial banking. Over the past two years, editorials, cable news shows and members of Congress have invoked Pecora’s name in calling for a serious congressional investigation of the financial crisis, but so far these calls have gone unheeded.
Raymond Smock, a former historian of the House of Representatives, is director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University. Roger Bruns is a historian and former deputy executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. They are co-editors with David Hostetter of the forthcoming “Congress Investigates: A Critical and Documentary History.”
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What’s the
Laura Ingraham channels the first family big idea? Judging Christina Romer
So, how do we assess the performance of Christina Romer, who is stepping down after 19 months as the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers to return to the University of California at Berkeley? It just so happens that one person particularly qualified to judge CEA chair Christina Romer is, well, professor Christina Romer. Back in 2002, at a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City conference, Romer, then a
Berkeley professor, presented a paper titled “The Evolution of Economic Understanding and Postwar Stabilization Policy.” The study, co-authored with her husband,David Romer, reviewed decades’ worth of economic policy, statements and forecasts by successive administrations and the Federal Reserve, assessing the policies and beliefs of officials since the end of World War II. As part of their painstaking research, the Romers even parsed the text of past Economic Reports of the President — the same report that Christine Romer led in her administration post. They concluded that economic wisdom does not move in a straight line from less knowledge to more. Rather, policymakers evolved from a “crude but fundamentally sensible model” of the economy in the 1950s to a “more formal but faulty” approach in the 1960s and 1970s, and then to a view that was “both sensible and sophisticated” in the 1980s and 1990s. Concerns about how to balance growth and inflation were ever present in this period, but the pendulum shifted dramatically over time, with different administrations judging the trade-off very differently. In her time at the CEA, Romer was an advocate of the stimulus package Obama signed into law early in his presidency and has pushed for more spending to spur growth. In their study, the Romers also found that internal economic forecasts generally improved in the 1980s and ’90s, losing some of the excessive optimism of previous years —a bit of an irony since, as CEA chair, Romer came under fire for forecasting that the stimulus was going to keep unemployment from surpassing 8 percent. (It passed 10 percent last fall and now stands at 9.5 percent.) Still, the paper concludes with a note of optimism, suggesting that policy shifts are driven less by ideology and political objectives and more by changes in our understanding of how the economy functions — meaning that policy should improve over time, though with some twists and turns along the way. Now Romer will have a chance to expand the study back at Berkeley to include her own public record, or expand her record if she is picked to run the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
—Carlos Lozada
lozadac@washpost.com diaries from B1
Ingraham establishes herself as one of the cleverest thorns in the administration’s side. In the diaries, we hear Obama, full of himself after his nomination, cheer the de- cision to move his acceptance speech from the 20,000-seat Pepsi Center to Invesco Field, big enough for 80,000 adoring fans. “If John Lennon and George Harrison came back from the dead for a Beatles re- union,” he writes, “do you think they’d be playing to a piddly 20,000 people?” Not long after his election, the Nobel
Prize committee sprinkles Miracle-Gro on the young president’s megalomania. “Oh, so Mr. Senator from Illinois . . . [is] in over his head, is he?” Obama snorts. “I’ve got three words for you, Diary: NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.” Obama calls up Bill Clin- ton and asks for advice on how to handle his latest honor. “I could hear him seeth- ing over the telephone,” Obama gloats. We read Hillary Clinton’s diary entry for the same day, full of spleen: “What did Bill and I ever do to deserve this? . . . Bill’s been calling me all day, and I know he wants to vent, but I just cannot deal with it right now. Let him grouse to one of his ‘friends.’ ” Obama’s religious commitment gets more than a few darts. At a White House Easter breakfast for Christian leaders, the president begins to read a speech from a teleprompter when a pastor interrupts him: “Excuse me, Mr. President, could you lead us in grace?” First lady Michelle writes, “I had to put my coffee cup in front of my mouth so they wouldn’t see me laughing. The only time I’ve ever heard Barack say grace is when it was preceded by ‘Will & . . .’ ”
We glimpse other White House figures.
There’s the stud Biden who ogles any babe passing through the West Wing. When Co- lombian pop star Shakira chats with Oba- ma about immigration, Biden confides to his diary: “Honestly, if they all looked like this hot tamale, I’d tear down the border fence myself.” The vain VP worries end- lessly about his thinning hair and pre- pares for a new procedure to thicken his
That’s the power of satire: to awaken its audience by shock and exaggeration, with- out commentary. But the diaries, unfortu- nately, make up only part of the book. Half, if not more, of “The Obama Diaries” is In- graham’s critique of the Obama family and administration — smartly written, to be sure, with effective rhetorical flourishes. For instance, Ingraham blames Obama’s mother for failing to instill strong reli-
“I’ve got three words for you, Diary: NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.”
mane, even though his doctor warns that he no longer has enough hair on the back of his head to replant on the crown. “Doc,” Biden confides, “you can always graft some off my tookis.” There’s also Grandma Robinson, who brings a dash of reality to Michelle’s Stalin- ist dietary rules for her children. The baby- sitter in chief writes: “Miche caught me in the hallway bringing a stack of cookies to Sasha’s room. You’d swear she had busted me with a crack pipe.” Robinson knows Michelle herself isn’t a paragon of dietary virtue. “Since she dug that vegetable gar- den, you’d think Miche never touched a dessert in her life,” she writes on another occasion. “I know better! I’ve seen the pan- els they added to the back of that state- dinner dress.”
All of this is great fun. And the book might have been a little masterpiece, if it weren’t for a fatal flaw. Ingraham can’t de- cide whether she wants to be a satirist or a polemicist. The satirist would have given us the diaries, kept herself out of the story and let us make what we wanted of them.
gious faith in her son. As the author puts it: “Stanley Ann Dunham exposed her son Barack to religion the way one would ex- pose a child to poisonous snakes — as a distant curiosity.” But Ingraham’s interposition essentially kills the satire. No reader of the genre wants to know that the author gets “choked up at ball games” every time she hears the national anthem. A laudable sentiment, but not one for a snarling, thick-skinned satirist to acknowledge. You either maintain the literary conceit or you abandon it — flip-flopping, as any political pundit knows, only leaves a ruinous im- balance. In Ingraham’s case, it causes her to squander her literary deadeye on vapid hyperbole — the kind of political belching commonly found in the pages of inferior conservative stylists such as Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity. “So we have a lot of work ahead of us,” she stoops to conclude. “This is ‘freedom’s last stand.’ ” And she was so close to a seat at Swift’s table!
levingstons@washpost.com Outlook’s editors welcome comments and suggestions. Write to us at
outlook@washpost.com.
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