The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The inquiry that wasn’t
Congress wasn’t meant to be an investigative body, and it shows
MIDDLETOWN — As written, our Constitution allots no investigative function to Congress, other than impeachment proceedings in the Senate. The list of large things Congress shall do, set forth in Article I, Section 8, and beginning with “have power to lay and collect taxes,” includes what Congress shall regulate, establish, provide for, constitute, declare, define and more.
Investigate? They were going to be too busy for that. They were going to be more or less running the country. That was the idea.
No, Congress wasn’t designed to be an investigative outfit. Whether it’s a crime, a scientific matter, or your family tree that needs investigating, your first choice for the job will probably not be a committee of all-purpose politicians who have to sweat fundraising even if their seats are safe.
These days, the executive branch runs the country, for the most part, and congressional investigations abound.
All right, then: Whoever you are and whatever you’re investigating, it’s important to keep in mind what the possible answers are to the questions you ask. If you ask Vladimir Putin whether he ordered the murder of a Russian double agent who had been living free in London after a spies-for-spies prisoner swap, there may be something interesting about what Putin says or the way he says it — but you need to bear in mind that there is no universe in which he says, “Yes, I did.”
If you take his denial at face value, you aren’t really investigating.
That shouldn’t need saying, but it’s how the House Intelligence Committee conducted its “investigation” of Russia’s hack of our elections and the possibility of Trump/Russia collusion. Under the firm control of the Republican majority — that’s how they do it in the committees — witness after witness was asked, in effect, “Did you collude with Russia?”
And when they said “no,” they were not required to produce the documents that might not support their claims. The witnesses who might have disputed those claims were not called to testify. The committee acted as if these people might have said, “Sure, I did.”
Will Rogers is credited with remarking, “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Sure enough, it has traditionally been the Republican party that has known how to herd the cats. Then again, now there’s the Freedom Caucus, a notably recalcitrant Tea Party/libertarian faction within the GOP. Nor is it unknown, these days, to find every single Democrat voting the same way: say, against an attempt to repeal Obamacare.
But however tight party discipline is or isn’t, we have to hope and assume that our legislators do what they do because they choose to. To believe otherwise has some rather dark implications for our theory of representative government.
With our nation’s elections under sustained attack from a hostile power, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chose, of their own free will, to short circuit any real investigation of that attack. Unfortunately for them, such an investigation would keep turning up connections between Trump people and Putin people.
Faced with this conundrum, Republicans on the committee chose to investigate the investigation. Apparently, their idea is that the true hostile power is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and that, despite the unambiguous consensus of the intelligence community both here and in other democracies, Russia’s hack of our elections doesn’t merit a real investigation.
It matters who these people are. Other people might have acted differently: we have to believe that.
Here are their names: Devin Nunes, California; Mike Conaway, Texas; Peter King, New York; Frank LoBiondo, New Jersey; Rick Crawford, Arkansas; Trey Gowdy, South Carolina; Tom Rooney, Florida; Will Hurd, Texas; Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida; Mike Turner, Ohio; Brad Wenstrup, Ohio; Chris Stewart, Utah; Elise Stefanik, New York.