When Congress Checks Out

Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2006

Summary:  Over the past six years, Congress' oversight of the executive branch on foreign and national security policy has virtually collapsed. Compounding the problem, the Bush administration has aggressively asserted executive prerogatives -- sometimes with dire consequences. The oversight problem must be fixed, ideally as part of a more fundamental effort to restore the balance between the two branches.

Norman J. Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Thomas E. Mann holds the W. Averell Harriman Chair and is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. They are the authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.

A KILLER BLIND SPOT

Thursday, August 3, 2006, was a remarkable day in Congress. The Senate Armed Services Committee held an oversight hearing on Iraq featuring three star witnesses: General John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command; General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The hearing led the evening news, with footage of General Abizaid, echoed by General Pace, warning about the danger of a civil war in Iraq. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked both generals if they had foreseen that possibility a year earlier; both said no. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) recited to Secretary Rumsfeld a litany of failures over the past three years; his first response was "Oh my goodness."

The frank and pessimistic admissions by two top generals and the tense moment of theater between Senator Clinton and Secretary Rumsfeld were striking indeed. But even more striking was the fact of the oversight hearing itself. Secretary Rumsfeld, when asked to testify, first brushed off the request, changing his mind only after Senator Clinton turned his refusal into a major public issue.

Oversight failures in regard to the Iraq war go back to before the beginning of the war. On June 15 of this year, the House of Representatives convened a debate over the war -- which Democrats called a sham -- to consider a nonbinding resolution about whether to stay the course or cut and run. It was the first formal discussion of the U.S. military role in Iraq since Congress voted to authorize the use of force in October 2002. And that was not much to brag about. As Thomas Ricks writes in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, "When the House debate began there was just one reporter in the press gallery. At their most intense points, the debates in both the House and Senate attracted fewer than 10 percent of each body's members." Unlike during the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, there was little sustained discussion before the Iraq war. As Ricks puts it, "There were many failures in the American system that led to the war, but the failures in Congress were at once perhaps the most important and the least noticed." He adds, "There was little follow-up investigation or oversight. There were, for example, no hearings with returning division commanders."

Congress has also done little about the Bush administration's lack of any plan for the post-Saddam Hussein regime, its quashing of the State Department's planning, and its stunning failure to provide adequate armor to all U.S. troops. One senator said of the equipment problem, "There really is no excuse for this. Many in the military thought this would be a short conflict, and they did not want to lay out large sums of money for vehicles that would soon be superfluous. Some of the Pentagon officials said that there was only one manufacturer of the appropriate body armor, and the pipeline got clogged. If we had ridden herd on them regularly and publicly, it would have been different."

Thus, whatever intermittent oversight there has been so far has come from the media. On July 30, 2006, a front-page story in The New York Times reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development had engaged in "an accounting shell game" to hide huge cost overruns in the $1.4 billion reconstruction program in Iraq while "knowingly with[holding] information on schedule delays from Congress." The same day, The Washington Post showcased a major story, headlined "Report on Prewar Intelligence Lagging," about a long-promised oversight report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the lead-up to the war. Nine months earlier, responding to charges by committee Democrats that the report had been sidetracked for political reasons, the committee's chair, Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), had asserted it was near completion. The Washington Post story made clear Roberts' intention to delay its release until after the elections in November. (Pressure from Democrats and two Republican senators resulted in a partial release in September.)

These two articles underscored some of the reasons for the lack of oversight: the executive branch's willful denial of accurate and meaningful information to Congress, the growing partisan divide in Congress, and the reluctance of congressional Republicans to criticize the administration (especially Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, of Illinois; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, of Tennessee; and House Armed Services Committee Chair Duncan Hunter, of California). But these accounts barely scratch the surface. Even more worrisome are the broader dynamic that has led to the sharp decline in Congress' influence over foreign policy and the policy failures that have occurred as a result.

CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS

Since Congress has shown little appetite for any serious oversight or for using the power of the purse or pointed public hearings to call the executive branch to account, executive agencies that once viewed Congress with at least some trepidation now regard it with contempt.

In March 2003, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee slated a hearing to examine the postinvasion planning for Iraq, with retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, the first U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, as the star witness. Garner canceled at the last minute, prompting the committee's chair, Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), to call the event a "fiasco." "He was not able to come to the [Senate] Dirksen Building, but could brief [reporters] in the Pentagon," Lugar told the National Journal. "On the face of it, it was ridiculous." A senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee told us that Chair John Warner (R-Va.) was apoplectic when Garner also stood up his committee. Last January, an hour into a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on mine safety, Chair Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.) asked the administration's top two mine-safety officials to stay for another hour to answer more questions. It was a routine request, but the two said they were too busy and, despite another more pointed appeal from Specter, abruptly rose and exited through a back door. Relating the incident, The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus reported that the Bush administration "thinks of congressional oversight as if it were a trip to the dentist, to be undertaken reluctantly and gotten over with as quickly as possible. Most astonishingly, it reserves the right simply to ignore congressional dictates that it has decided intrude too much on executive branch power."