On Congressional Oversight & Investigations

Zachary Roth has an excellent article in the upcoming June 2006 issue of the Washington Monthly about how the Democrats should investigate President George W. Bush, should they take back Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. Writing about the refusal of the current GOP Congress to monitor the administration's activities, Roth notes:

This is not the approach the GOP Congress took when Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office. Since 1997, the House Government Reform committee has issued over 1000 subpoenas related to allegations of misconduct involving the Clinton
administration or the Democratic party—compared to just 15 related to Bush administration or Republican abuses. The seemingly endless probes of the Clinton administration turned up little in the way of corruption, and stymied the Republican revolution: In the 1998 midterm elections, with the Lewinsky scandal in the news, Democrats picked up seats in Congress.

But those investigations left a residue of ill will that Republicans have cleverly turned to their own advantage. In a stunning display of chutzpah, GOP leaders are now exploiting voters' fears of endless partisan investigations—fears that they themselves created with their own behavior in the '90s—to caution with faux solemnity that Democrats, if given control of one or both houses of Congress, would impeach the president and plunge the nation into turmoil. In a recent fundraising email, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman warned that Democrats “will censure and impeach the President if they win back Congress.”

The fact that the GOP can take advantage of a fear that they created, shows both their political abilities, and their lack of ethics. On the issue of the absurd investigations during the Clinton presidency, Roth remembers:

The Clinton administration provided Congress with more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries—including, at one point, the White House Christmas-card list. But voters quickly came to see the effort, which culminated with the impeachment of the president, as partisan and vindictive, and it backfired. House speaker Newt Gingrich left office in disgrace, while Clinton finished his second term with lofty approval ratings.

The main point of Roth's article is that the Democrats must overcome their fears of 1990s-esque backlash, and instead conduct any potential investigation in a ethical and (as much as possible) bipartisan manner. There have been constant examples throughout history (as Roth notes) where Congress has investigated a President appropriately, regardless of whether that President was a member of the majority. It is the Democrats' responsibility to return America to those better days.