Congressional Oversight Quotes

It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118)

This Bush Doctrine stands today and is assumed by President Obama to be legitimate as he carries out a secret drone war worldwide with no congressional input or oversight.

It is often believed that, as long as we’re the economic powerhouse of the world and have a huge military advantage, we can control the world by “owning” international organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank. These international organizations may also be used as a means to get around congressional oversight and restrictions that Congress and the people might prefer. To a degree, that control has been achieved. But now that the US is the largest debtor nation in the world and in all history, the days of military and economic supremacy are numbered, as are the days of dollar hegemony.

the mystery was far from solved. Nobody understood why heparin—which is made from the mucosal lining of pig intestines, most of which come from China—was suddenly making patients sick. In February 2008, the FDA discovered the likely source of the contamination: a Chinese plant supplying crude heparin to Baxter. In a clerical blunder, the FDA had completely overlooked and failed to inspect the facility, Changzhou SPL, located about 150 miles west of Shanghai. Instead, it inspected and approved a plant with a similar-sounding name. Predictably, once FDA officials finally traveled to Changzhou in February 2008 to make an on-the-ground inspection, they found serious problems. The facility had dirty manufacturing tanks and no reliable method of removing impurities from heparin, and it acquired the crude heparin from workshops that had not been inspected. Chinese regulators were no help at all. A loophole in Chinese regulations allowed certain pharmaceutical plants to register as chemical plants, which made them subject to far less oversight. For U.S. congressional investigator David Nelson, whose committee was now immersed in the heparin crisis as well, the situation laid bare the “classically good reason to be suspect of production coming from any country that doesn’t have competent regulatory authority.” The FDA issued an import alert in March 2008, meaning that Changzhou SPL’s shipments would be stopped at the U.S. border. Though

Operation Angelmaker had a real name, “The Joint Preparedness Task Force on the Convention of Potentially Dangerous Assets,” but TJPTFOTCOPDA just didn’t work as an acronym. So OA they became, a covert group so secret only the immediate members knew it existed. There was no congressional oversight, no Presidential discretion, just the head of the CIA and people on a purely need-to-know basis.

Congressional oversight: When a congressional representative forgets to do something. (Historical note: this phrase once had another meaning, but since 9/11, years in which Congress never heard a wish of the national security state that it didn’t grant, no one can quite remember what it was.)

Mr. Cohen was only recently able to access a hard drive with important documents. Said drive contains over 14 million files, which consist of all e-mails, voice recordings, images, and attachments from Mr. Cohen’s computers and phones. To date, Mr. Cohen has located several documents that we believe have significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees. Working alone, Mr. Cohen has only had the time to go through less than 1 percent of the drive, or approximately 3,500 files. Mr. Cohen needs time, resources, and assistance to separate out privileged and personal documents from these 14 million files to make the rest available for review by various congressional committees that have sought his help in fulfilling their Article I oversight responsibilities. Mr. Cohen is prepared to do so – but it will take time, effort, and ready accessibility to members of Congress and their staffs to assist in providing the relevant documents.

American intelligence, by contrast, sharply distinguishes between foreign and domestic targets. Almost all American intelligence is aimed abroad, at foreign allies and adversaries. Only one of the eighteen intelligence agencies has domestic intelligence collection as a core mission: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is housed within the Department of Justice and operates with extensive legal and policy constraints, judicial review, and congressional oversight to protect American rights.36 The National Security Act of 1947 explicitly prohibits the CIA from exercising any “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions.

Democrat who could not be easily removed by a subsequent president. Second, they funded the agency through the profits of the Federal Reserve rather than through congressional appropriations, ensuring there would be no oversight, accountability, or budgetary constraints. Finally, according to Rubin, they staffed the

And why did we need both an SEC and a CFTC—which often battled each other—to regulate the securities markets? Was the profusion of agencies grounded in some underlying legal or economic logic, or was it mainly about turf? The main answer was political: If you have multiple regulators, you need multiple congressional oversight committees, each of which is a gold mine for political contributions.

Executive order 12333, the 1981 presidential document authorizing most of NSA's surveillance, is incredibly permissive. It is supposed to primarily allow the NSA to conduct surveillance outside the US, but it gives the agency broad authority to collect data on Americans. It provides minimal protections for Americans' data collected outside the US, and even less for the hundreds of millions of innocent non-Americans whose data is incidentally collected. Because this is a presidential directive and not a law, courts have no jurisdiction, and congressional oversight is minimal. Additionally, at least in 2007, the president believed he could modify or ignore it at will and in secret. As a result, we know very little about how Executive Order 12333 is being interpreted inside the NSA.

the American system of checks and balances disperses federal lawmaking authority among multiple, overlapping political forums. As a result, federal policymaking power is shared: Congress is given the primary power to draft laws, subject to the president's veto and judicial review; the executive branch is given the primary power to implement laws, subject to congressional oversight and judicial review; and the courts have the primary power to interpret laws, subject to a variety of legislative and executive checks, including the appointment process, budgetary powers, and the passage of "overrides"-laws that explicitly reverse or materially modify existing judicial interpretations of statutes.

Congress has the power to make laws, but the president can veto them, and vetoes can be overridden only by congressional supermajorities. The president and his executive branch enforce the laws, but there is congressional and judicial oversight. The judiciary interprets the Constitution and the laws, but judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Trump’s willingness to attack the 2020 election process even after being impeached a few months earlier suggests that we live in an era when confidence in presidential power and party loyalty seems greater than concerns about congressional oversight or public shame.

Changes to the Department of Justice Back up the independence of the department by making it a criminal act for any member of the executive branch to directly intercede in a case for personal reasons. Allow an independent judge – not associated with a particular case – the ability to oversee plea deals. Allow more direct congressional oversight of actions in the justice department. Institute more judicial oversite on plea bargaining. 97 percent of the cases end up there. Appoint a congressional committee to investigate and recommend changes to the ongoing DOJ culture that emphasizes closure rates and stiff sentences. Re-examine the maxim “Tough on Crime” to address real life issues – including mandatory sentencing guidelines. Institute guidelines to reduce the adversarial nature of the American Justice system and make the defense and the prosecution more equal under law.

Merging the SEC and CFTC was a political nonstarter because they were overseen by separate committees in Congress. The congressional oversight committees jealously guarded their turf because the market players regulated by the two agencies could be counted on to provide lucrative campaign contributions.

enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight, and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”94

Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.