By Gail Russell Chaddock, The Christian Science Monitor
Not since the Depression-era Congress of 1932 has Capitol Hill ramped up so quickly for oversight hearings and related legislation – most targeting the Bush administration.
Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are hiring more lawyers, and watchdog groups say they are swamped with calls from committee staff asking for advice on pursuing the nearly lost art of congressional investigation.
In its first 100 days, the new Congress launched probes on allegations ranging from contracting abuses in Iraq and the alteration of scientific findings to the misuse of federal resources for partisan purposes. Some hearings, such as those on last year’s firing of eight US attorneys, were snatched from the headlines; others are longer-term campaigns to try to uncover any government waste waste and to expand the public’s access to how government conducts its business.
“There’s a whole culture of effective oversight, which the Congress carried out in the 1970s up through the early 1990s, that has been very much lost, and there’s a lot of effort now going on to rebuild oversight skills,” says Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and a former deputy House counsel.