Stamping Out Oversight and Political Payback

Here's yet another reason why we need a Democratic Congress. Anytime there's any attempt to engage in meaningful oversight of the Republicans, they fire the overseers. When the overseers are duly elected Representatives of Congress, they won't be able to do this.

This evening, Congressional Quarterly reports that in a round of calls Monday evening, (House Appropriation Committee Chairman Jerry) Lewis fired 60 investigators who had worked for his committee rooting out fraud, waste and abuse, effective immediately. As in, don't bother coming in on Tuesday.

The investigators were contract workers, brought on to handle the extraordinary level of fraud investigations facing the panel.

Lewis totally lied about this, by the way, claiming that the sacking was part of a "bipartisan staff review" in conjunction with the ranking Democrat David Obey of Wisconsin. Except Obey and the committee's other Democrats were not consulted prior to the firing.

Along the same lines, last week Peter Hoekstra, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, suspended a Democratic staffer's access to classified information, claiming he was behind the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism earlier this month. Only there's no evidence to support that. And both Hoekstra and Ray LaHood (who requested the suspension) admit that the move was a deliberate instance of political payback.

LAHOOD: Well, look, we’ve had far too many leaks in the intelligence committee, and I’ve been on the committee eight years and I’m the vice chairman of the committee, and I’m sick and tired of leaks. And when I learned that this information was available to this staffer and a member, and then printed in the New York Times two days later, I really felt compelled, as a member of the committee that’s fed up with the leaks, to send a letter to the chairman and ask him to investigate it. And that’s what’s going on and given that fact that we, you know, we’ve tried to do things in a bipartisan way, this, you know, obviously clearly is a breach of that. So we just felt compelled to send the chairman a letter.

ANCHOR: Congressman, you wrote that letter nearly three weeks ago, and your letter is just surfacing now, at least to us in the media, you know a lot of Democrats are upset today, saying this is all happening just two weeks before the election, the timing is just suspect.

LAHOOD: Yeah, I’ll tell you why I did it, Jane. The reason why I did it is because Jane Harman released the Duke Cunningham — who sat on our Intelligence committee — report, in violation of the trust that she gave to Chairman Hoekstra, in saying that it would be released in a bipartisan way. She released it arbitrarily, and I’m furious about that. She betrayed the trust of the committee because that report was to be released in a bipartisan way. She released it to the media just to embarrass, 21 days before the election, Republicans on the committee. That’s the reason that I released my letter today.

ANCHOR: So it’s payback?

LAHOOD: Look it, this is–we’re in the political season, and if the ranking member on our committee wants to play politics, there’re some of us on the other side that can equally play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.

The reason we need a Democratic Congress (OK, one of 16,702) is that we need the return of checks and balances and actual oversight of the executive branch. If the majority party scuttles investigations by firing the investigators, if they ruin staffer's lives to make a political point, if they arrogantly intimidate anybody trying to look into their practices, then you have no oversight. You have a government run amok.