Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,72

for national security. But I knew at the time that the process was also ripe for abuse.

With the release of the OIG report, will Democrats rise to the occasion by looking for solutions to a well-documented problem? They should. I found my Democratic colleagues to be very helpful on privacy issues. This is an area of bipartisan agreement.

Back when attacking the FISA Court was helpful in attacking Republican president George W. Bush, Democrats were outspoken in their calls for reform. Even the liberal Brennan Center published a report in 2015 analyzing what went wrong with the FISA Court. But with the FISA Court in the crosshairs of a plot to undermine President Donald Trump, how willing will House Democrats be to acknowledge the abuse committed on their behalf? Will they be willing to provide serious oversight when doing so requires them to take a political hit?

There remain systemic executive branch problems that good oversight can positively influence. Democrats have a valuable opportunity to demonstrate their ability to make government work.

Furthermore, there is important follow-up that needs to be done on previous successful investigations to ensure that the laws we passed actually resolved the problems we sought to fix. Did our attempts to empower inspector generals in the wake of the Clinton email scandal result in better access to agency documents? Did the culture at the Secret Service improve after our bipartisan work to hold senior leaders accountable and to address the perverse incentives in the pay structure? Have our reforms of the Freedom of Information Act resulted in a more responsive document production process? Is there more that needs to be done?

Many of those investigations were bipartisan in nature, with Cummings directly engaged in the collaboration. They started with an investigation and ended with a solution. I hope he will take some time away from Trump witch hunting to continue some of that important work. The opportunities to identify and address instances of waste, fraud, and abuse are as plentiful as ever. Scrutiny of executive branch function is not a bad thing. It’s critical to good government. But with so many committees consumed by the effort to get a specific outcome—to take down the president of the United States—will Democrats be part of the solution, or will they be part of the problem in Washington?

Congress must focus its limited time and effort where it can have the greatest legislative impact. It is a dereliction of duty when the committee abandons programmatic and effective oversight of those trillions of dollars and instead focuses on nongovernmental activity.

Headline-grabbing congressional investigations do not necessarily signify a strong and functional legislative body; to the contrary, they can be a sign of a dysfunctional and weak body. Functional legislative bodies are there to legislate. Dysfunctional ones resort to political messaging that never seems to produce actual legislation. All of this gets us further and further away from the original premise of the House Oversight Committee, which had been in place for more than two hundred years—to review government expenditures. The committee is not set up to be the truth police, nor is it meant to duplicate the prosecutorial work of the executive branch with regard to the private sector. Our focus is and always has been government.

House investigations are meant to be solutions driven, not outcome driven. For Congress to identify an individual person as a target and then use the full force of congressional oversight to destroy that person is a gross abuse of power. To do so merely to remove a political obstacle is abhorrent and likely unconstitutional. Yet that is exactly what this Congress is doing to this president. It’s what Nadler has suggested doing to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Maintaining White House Security

If there’s one current investigation that legitimately offers a chance to resolve a systemic problem, it is the oversight of the White House security clearance process. Chairman Elijah Cummings and his committee have prime jurisdiction over security clearances at the White House. It’s an important issue and a legitimate investigation to pursue.

Chairman Cummings has a whistle-blower whose allegations are exactly the kind of testimony Congress should look into. But the way the committee is going about this investigation is all wrong. It doesn’t seem to be about getting to the bottom of a serious problem, but instead about winning the news cycle.

Let me explain. The committee wanted to hear testimony from White House security chief Carl Kline. If Kline appears voluntarily, he is entitled to a government attorney to advise him. If