Power Grab

by Jason Chaffetz

  Government abuses were the scandals we targeted. Using the investigative tools of Congress to perform political opposition research on a single individual—even the president—is simply not appropriate. It is an abuse of power that undermines the authority and credibility of the entire legislative oversight process.

  Republicans could have easily opened politically motivated investigations. There were calls to look into President Obama’s association with anti-Semitic radicals Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former terrorist Bill Ayers, and other virulently anti-American characters. Some wanted an investigation into a sweetheart mortgage Obama was given by convicted felon and Obama campaign bundler Tony Rezko. Some wanted us to look into the mysterious disappearance of Obama’s college transcripts or even the legitimacy of his birth certificate!

  None of these questions have anything to do with the purpose of oversight: crafting legislation and overseeing government expenditures. Such investigations would have been criticized as political stunts, and rightly so. My colleagues and I weren’t willing to misuse the committee resources for that purpose. Nor would our leadership have supported such a ploy. Yet that is exactly how the new batch of Democratic committee chairs have been approaching the awesome responsibility of government oversight.

  At a time when the president’s opponents are hyperventilating over whether a nondisclosure payment qualifies as a campaign contribution, far too much of the investigatory apparatus of Congress has been converted to the unofficial opposition research arm of the Democratic National Committee. The Federal Election Commission might want to consider the value of that campaign contribution.

  The prerogative to investigate the executive branch does not rest solely with Chairman Elijah Cummings and the House Oversight Committee. Each House and Senate committee has jurisdiction over specific parts of the government and can thus launch limited investigations that involve specific agencies within that committee’s jurisdiction. For Democrats, it’s all hands on deck to target the president of the United States.

  Certainly the most high-profile theater of battle between House Democrats and the Trump administration leading up to the 2020 presidential election will be in the committee I once chaired. The committee, now named the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is ground zero for investigations of the Trump administration, although other committees are ramping up aggressive presidential investigations as well.

  The House Oversight Committee has the broadest mandate of any House committee. It can look at any government agency or expenditure. But the real focus of Speaker Pelosi’s leadership team is on President Trump. Already, Chairman Cummings has launched probes targeting the president, looking into the activities of the president’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, investigating White House security clearances, and questioning White House dealings with Saudi Arabia. It remains to be seen what, if any, legislative goals they hope these investigations would achieve.

  In the House Judiciary Committee, Democratic chairman Jerry Nadler of New York can go after anything involving federal law enforcement, including the DOJ, the courts, immigration, and even internet and intellectual property issues. He started with investigations of obstruction of justice by the president in a counterintelligence operation, violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause by the president, and what the committee is calling abuses of power—a reference to Trump’s insults against the media. But that was just the beginning.

  Over in the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Adam Schiff can investigate the most highly classified subjects involving counterterrorism, defense intelligence, and advanced research. He is using his authority to pursue a do-over of the Mueller investigation, going after President Trump for discredited connections with Russia, determining whether foreign actors have sought leverage over the president, and investigating obstruction of justice.

  Schiff, who thought the investigation of the murder of four Americans in Benghazi was duplicative, “a colossal waste of time,” and “a tremendous red herring and a waste of taxpayer resources,” has had a change of heart about duplicative investigations now that President Trump is the target. He has hired his own experts to prosecute a case against President Trump. Former NBC News legal analyst Daniel Goldman serves as a senior advisor to the House Select Committee on Intelligence. His experience as an assistant United States attorney for the highly politicized Southern District of New York makes him a seasoned prosecutor. Instead of addressing foreign threats to the United States, Schiff seeks to second-guess the outcome of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which involved more than 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 interviews, and more than $25 million in costs.

  House Financial Services Committee chairman Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, is using her committee oversight of financial institutions to investigate President Trump’s charitable foundation. She is also attempting to compel financial institutions with which Trump does business to divulge information to the committee that regulates them.

  In the House Ways and Means Committee, Democratic chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts is probing the president’s tax returns, working with Waters to compel Capital One and other financial institutions to turn over documents. The House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey, vowed “robust oversight of the Trump administration’s ongoing actions to sabotage our healthcare system, exacerbate climate change and weaken consumer protections.”

  Not to be outdone, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman and New York Democrat Elliot Engel chose to eliminate the Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade Subcommittee and replace it with a new Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee that is investigating all things Trump. Who cares about terrorism or nuclear proliferation when you can be the seventh House committee to try to duplicate the Mueller investigation?

  This highly coordinated and targeted effort to take down the sitting president sucks all the oxygen from the room, leaving no one to do the real work of congressional oversight. I fear that when oversight is seen as nothing more than a political operation, it loses its legitimacy and weakens our republic. All of this occurs even as Democrats promote ambitious plans to overhaul our society, damage what’s left of our free markets, and transform our government. Without congressional oversight, what’s to stop them?

  How Oversight Should Work

  Our sprawling federal bureaucracy and multitrillion-dollar budget need more oversight, not less. My belief in the importance of congressional oversight does not diminish when the tables turn and my party holds the presidency while the opposing party holds the House majority. The more government grows, the more oversight it requires.

  The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is an independent executive branch agency that does a great job policing the various federal departments, but that role is different from the one Congress can play. OIG investigations, audits, and reviews are often limited in scope, authority, and impact. Congress has broader authority, it has subpoena power, and it has the media megaphone to call attention to things administrations or partisan media may prefer to bury.

  I know the public gets frustrated that Congress cannot do more to expose and punish wrongdoing. That frustrated me as well. They don’t give members of Congress handcuffs, nor should they. As I outlined in my previous book, The Deep State, there are specific fixes we should implement to address the shortcomings of the oversight process. While Congress should never be given the power to prosecute lawbreaking, it does need the ability to enforce its access to documents and testimony. Nevertheless, the weaponization of the Department of Justice in the first two years of the Trump administration proves why oversight from outside the executive branch is such an important function of Congress.

  To the extent congressional investigations can expose what happens in darkness, they serve as one of the few disincentives to abuse power in the executive branch. As I’ve often said, absent market forces to constrain behavior, the federal bureaucracy needs
the threat of public exposure to keep it in line. The fact that the exposure may be motivated by political considerations makes the tool no less potent.

  Legitimate oversight is nothing to be feared. If someone inside the Trump administration has legitimately broken the law, compromised national security, or abused their power, they should be held accountable like anybody else. I think President Trump would agree. It was my experience that President Obama did not. Nevertheless, rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse should be a priority in any administration. Oversight is not overreach simply because the target of an investigation shares our political views.

  I had the opportunity to work with Chairman Elijah Cummings while he served as the House Oversight Committee’s ranking member. Despite some of our public disputes during hearings, we made a serious effort to work collaboratively on many investigations. We developed a mutual respect and a friendship that would probably surprise people. Together we pursued dozens of bipartisan investigations that often drew little media coverage, but ultimately helped hold people accountable.

  I’m proud of the work we did on prescription drugs, Freedom of Information Act reforms, legislation to empower inspector generals, uncovering misconduct and improving security with the Secret Service, exposure of wrongdoing at the Drug Enforcement Administration, and efforts to uncover the truth of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. We were able to work together to root out some of the incompetence that can inevitably be found in large bureaucracies and to be a catalyst for effective reforms. This is oversight as it is meant to be conducted. Now that Cummings holds the chairmanship, I would like nothing better than to see him continue that bipartisan tradition of working together to root out the problems within the federal bureaucracy.

  Policy Replaced with Politics

  Unfortunately, I think Speaker Pelosi believes the tools Chairman Cummings now controls are far too valuable politically to waste on government accountability or problem solving. These are not her priorities. They don’t excite the base to donate to political campaigns and nonprofits. They do not generate invitations to Sunday news shows or get members featured in viral media clips. Instead, she wants the oversight tools for her war on Donald Trump.

  Make no mistake. The transformation taking place right now is not merely a change of partisan control. What is coming is a fundamental transformation of the oversight role. The Oversight, Judiciary, and Intelligence committees’ investigative powers are becoming primarily a political weapon. Pelosi sees them as a tool to build narratives. She has little care whether those narratives are true or false, only that they move the needle in the next election.

  Don’t expect to see much energy being devoted to bipartisan efforts to clean up government in the run-up to a high-stakes presidential race. Those types of efforts may well become another casualty in this political war for dominance. While Cummings is very capable of providing substantive and effective oversight, he is also a loyal soldier for Speaker Pelosi and unfortunately seems to concur with her inclination to convert oversight resources to weapons on the political battlefield.

  The renaming of the committee to remove the word government was the first signal that the 116th Congress will have little interest in traditional investigations of waste, fraud, and abuse in executive branch agencies. The decision also signals a metamorphosis of congressional committees to extend their oversight jurisdiction beyond mere government entities and into the furthest reaches of the American economy. Targeting individuals and private sector entities is an abuse of the committee’s power. But it’s already happening.

  In fact, when Chairman Cummings was interviewed by 60 Minutes just after taking the chairmanship, he indicated a belief that his committee could investigate anything, without limit and without regard to whether the subject of the investigation is government related at all.

  Coincidentally, this threat to dramatically expand the committee’s scope brings some financial perks to the campaigns of committee members.

  The House Oversight Committee is considered a “C” committee, meaning seats on the committee are not as difficult to get as the more choice “A” and “B” committees. “A” committees are designated as such primarily because of the ability of committee members to fund-raise off those with business before the committee. Freshman members seldom get “A” committee assignments—those are generally reserved for more senior members. When members are competing for spots and ranking their choices, Oversight has not traditionally been very competitive. Everyone wants a coveted seat on the Appropriations Committee, which regulates spending, the Financial Services Committee, which regulates banks and Wall Street, or the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which regulates the tax code. These “A” committees have the power to tax, spend, and regulate some of the deepest pockets in America, so their members are an important target for donors and lobbyists.

  Traditionally, the House Oversight Committee has not been a threat to many private entities. It only engages with government entities, and its legislative jurisdiction primarily covers federal operations. With Cummings repositioning the committee to exercise jurisdiction over the entire American economy, K Street lobbyists will show a lot more interest. Members on the committee will find campaign contributions much easier to solicit. Perhaps more senior members will seek seats on the committee. We can expect to see government oversight and legislative reform take a backseat to campaign-driven priorities.

  The only government waste, fraud, or abuse we can expect Democrats to pursue will be that which can be pinned to the Trump administration and its appointees. They will use every tool they once derided, taking each a step further, confident in the belief that the public will have forgotten their previously held positions and trusting that their media allies will remain silent.

  Subcommittees Get Woke

  Every committee chairman gets to exercise the prerogative to restructure the committee when taking over the gavel. When I took the Oversight chairmanship, I created two entirely new subcommittees—the Information Technology Subcommittee and the Subcommittee on the Interior. Likewise, Chairman Cummings gets to create a committee structure that reflects his priorities. Although the act of reorganizing subcommittees is nothing to fear, the changes Cummings made signal the committee’s coming metamorphosis.

  Both of the new subcommittees I created in 2015 were eliminated by Democrats. They do not make very good weapons for 2020. Instead, Chairman Cummings replaced them with his own new subcommittees that are better suited for political warfare. The Committee on the Environment will help him promote the Democratic priority to use climate change as a pretext to grow government—a very useful tool on the political battlefield, but hardly one that lends itself to the committee’s core mission of rooting out government waste, fraud, or abuse.

  The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Committee will be useful in producing fodder for Democratic identity politics in the 2020 political campaigns. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Pelosi has assigned many of her best icons of identity politics to Cummings’s committee, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. This committee will also be primed to promote the voter suppression narratives upon which Democrats depend to fend off election security measures. I know from experience that Democrats on the committee firmly believe that election security is used as a pretext by racists to keep black and Hispanic people from voting. Don’t expect to see Democrats looking to secure elections, even in the face of Robert Mueller’s documented conclusion of Russian interference. For Democrats, identity politics and voter suppression narratives will trump election security every day of the week.

  Most disturbingly, an Economic and Consumer Policy Committee will presumably allow Cummings to fulfill the Democrats’ wish to expand their limited oversight jurisdiction over the federal government into broad oversight of the entire U.S. economy. This committee in particular will be helpful in targeting (and conceivably destroying) private companies and organiza
tions that do not align with the Democrat agenda. Alternatively, it can be used to back up Financial Services Committee chairman Maxine Waters’s efforts to target deep-pocketed financial institutions whose fines Democrats hope to use for public funding of political campaigns.

  Sacred Cows: Protecting Federal Employees

  Each new committee chairman brings certain priorities—often those that impact the constituents back home. That’s generally a good thing. In my case, I represented a large geographic area that was rural. The vast majority of land in this country is rural and I felt rural communities were not getting enough attention in the United States Congress. I created the Interior Subcommittee to address issues ranging from rural economies to tribal issues and from grazing to energy. There were many issues I felt were getting glossed over or didn’t neatly fit in other committees.

  Likewise, Chairman Cummings will be able to prioritize the things that matter in his district. I have no objection to that. He and I visited one another’s districts in 2013. He learned a lot about public lands. I learned about inner-city challenges like intergenerational poverty.

  Unfortunately, I’m afraid the home constituency that will matter most to committee Democrats will be the one that writes the biggest checks.

  Chairman Cummings’s home state of Maryland in 2018 had 144,542 federal employees according to figures published by Governing magazine. Cummings’s district includes anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 of those, depending on whether retirees are counted. Taking care of federal employees is and always has been a high priority for Democrats in general and for Chairman Cummings in particular. Yet his job as Oversight Committee chairman is theoretically to expose waste, fraud, and abuse within that very constituency.