Democrats are going to spend the next four years as if their job is to #Resist President Trump in all he does. That’s a shame (and shame on them) but it doesn’t mean Republicans should spend the next four years asking, “how high?” when Trump says “Jump!”
Republicans need to use their control of both chambers and the White House to restore the old-fashioned and essential idea that Congress should provide thorough oversight of the executive branch. Robust oversight would be good not only for the country as a whole, but for the GOP and the president himself.
Trump and his closest advisers, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, are new to governance. His Cabinet picks have less governing experience than many previous Cabinets. The Trump administration will need as much help as it can get, improving legislation, sharpening their joint agenda to improve the lives of the people and Congress can provide that help in the form of oversight.
In addition to passing laws, Congress’s duties include checking in on the executive branch. How are they spending the taxpayers’ money? How are they complying with mandates? What are their quality-control processes?
Different committees have oversight over different agencies, and oversight is supposed to be an around-the-clock, serious job.
For instance, Congress needs to ensure our government agencies are transparent. Federal laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Presidential Records Act, require the White House and the agencies to preserve records and make the records available to the press and the public. Administrations often fall short, either through sloppiness or desire for secrecy.
The Obama administration got away with slow-walking FOIA responses, claiming too many exemptions from FOIA, and generally abusing the process. (The same was true with the Bush administration.)
Just imagine if the Democratic Congress in 2009 and 2010 had done their oversight work properly and checked in on the State Department to ensure that officials there were following FOIA rules. Maybe they could have learned that the woman running the department was evading FOIA by moving all her work emails to a private server and not handing them over in a timely manner.
Rectifying that problem in 2010 could have left the Democrats in a different situation today.
The Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committees both have subcommittees whose jobs include overseeing the Internal Revenue Service. As soon as hints emerged that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups, these committees should have launched immediate investigations.
Congressional oversight might have detected early on that the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t going to be ready to launch a functioning online health-insurance portal.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress both failed in their duty to oversee Obama’s wars. A disastrous regime change in Libya and an unaccountable drone war in Yemen were the fruits of their neglect.
So Benghazi, the healthcare.gov debacle, IRS targeting and the Hillary Clinton email scandal all might have been prevented or mitigated by strong congressional oversight.
Those disasters contributed to the decimation of Democrats both on Capitol Hill and across the country. They governed very poorly and now they are likely to be largely powerless for years to come.
Republicans should not repeat the mistake of giving the executive branch a free pass just because it was run by a president of their own party. They can help him be more effective and therefore more popular by doing their constitutional duty.
They need to make oversight great again. Congress should increase funding for oversight. Of all the ways to spend taxpayer money, investigating and regulating the rest of the government is one of the best. And each subcommittee chairman should make oversight a central part of his or her job.
Otherwise, the executive branch will try to get away with stuff — it always does. Career bureaucrats will buck their chief executive. Without strong oversight, Trump’s political appointees will continue the sort of sloppy work that, in Trump’s executive order on visas, brought him so much political and legal trouble. If Congress doesn’t return to the sort of oversight it’s supposed to conduct, those governing muscles will atrophy, and the next president will get away with even more.
For the next two years, at least, Republicans have control over the federal government. This is the opportunity to restart the norm of having Congress regulate the entity that most needs regulation: the federal leviathan.
