Watchdogs on the Hill

The Decline of Congressional Oversight of U.S. Foreign Relations

Linda L. Fowler

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691151625, 9780691151618
• eBook ISBN: 9781400866465
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An essential responsibility of the U.S. Congress is holding the president accountable for the conduct of foreign policy. In this in-depth look at formal oversight hearings by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Linda Fowler evaluates how the legislature's most visible and important watchdogs performed from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She finds a noticeable reduction in public and secret hearings since the mid-1990s and establishes that American foreign policy frequently violated basic conditions for democratic accountability. Committee scrutiny of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she notes, fell below levels of oversight in prior major conflicts.

Fowler attributes the drop in watchdog activity to growing disinterest among senators in committee work, biases among members who join the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and motives that shield presidents, particularly Republicans, from public inquiry. Her detailed case studies of the Truman Doctrine, Vietnam War, Panama Canal Treaty, humanitarian mission in Somalia, and Iraq War illustrate the importance of oversight in generating the information citizens need to judge the president's national security policies. She argues for a reassessment of congressional war powers and proposes reforms to encourage Senate watchdogs to improve public deliberation about decisions of war and peace.

Watchdogs on the Hill investigates America's national security oversight and its critical place in the review of congressional and presidential powers in foreign policy.

PART I

INFORMATION, REGULAR ORDER, AND DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.

— President Harry S. Truman before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947

INTRODUCTION

Oversight Hearings and U.S. Foreign Policy

AT THE DAWN OF THE COLD WAR, the United States confronted one of the most consequential foreign policy choices of the post–World War II generation. The Truman Doctrine, which the president announced in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, was the signature achievement of his administration and the cornerstone of U.S. strategy for more than four decades. Truman partnered with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at this unique historical moment to shape the policy and sell it to the nation. The committee conducted public hearings to explain the urgency of restraining Soviet expansion into Greece and Turkey and to garner support from reluctant citizens and advocacy groups. Its members orchestrated secret hearings with administration officials and opposing lawmakers to negotiate compromise language that would give President Truman a convincing legislative victory. The next year, Foreign Relations facilitated the adoption of the ambitious Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe through a strategic mix of public and executive sessions. Committee oversight hearings in 1947–48 thus proved indispensible for organizing deliberation and ensuring public accountability at a crucial turning point for the United States in international affairs.

Congress has engaged in oversight of the executive branch since the early days of the Republic.¹ The term “oversight” has roots in the verb “to oversee” and implies responsibility for an outcome by making sure that the people and organizations charged with a task complete it satisfactorily.² In the federal government, oversight encompasses a wide range of activity: “review of federal departments, agencies and commissions and the programs they administer … during program and policy implementation as well as afterward.”³ Typically, oversight is retrospective: did the executive carry out the intent of Congress in implementing the law? Yet it also can be prospective: is the president addressing an emerging problem in an appropriate way? By its very nature, then, legislative scrutiny of agency performance can either exacerbate conflict or bolster cooperation with the White House.

Oversight is built into the U.S. constitutional system to reinforce the rule of law and educate the public. Indeed, noted congressional observer Ralph Huitt asserted a generation ago that “the oversight function is probably the most important task the legislature performs.”⁴ Contemporary observers continue to assert its importance as the federal government has grown in size and complexity. With respect to foreign policy, oversight entails two vital functions: policing the vast bureaucratic apparatus, which Congress erected after World War II to prosecute the Cold War and later to combat global terrorism; and fostering public deliberation about complex and potentially deadly choices.

Congress has assigned responsibility for oversight to specialized standing committees that conduct formal inquiries, in both open hearings and secret sessions. Although committees are not the sole source of information about the president’s conduct of foreign affairs, they enjoy the legal authority and resources to command attention from the White House and focus public awareness that few individual lawmakers can match. They represent the collective interests of the institution and citizens in obtaining reliable, timely information about government policy.

Many committees exert jurisdiction over some aspect of international relations, such as trade, resource management, or drug trafficking, housed in various federal and agencies. However, the biggest administrative players, the Departments of Defense and State, are under the respective supervision of the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate, and the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate and the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House.⁵ The two Senate committees enjoy greater prestige, higher visibility, and more opportunities for policy entrepreneurship than their counterparts in the House. Such characteristics make them fruitful candidates for in-depth analysis of national security oversight because their actions are more likely to be consequential.

This book examines the formal hearing activity of the Senate’s key national security committees, Armed Services and Foreign Relations, from 1947 to 2008, to assess their efficacy in promoting due process and public understanding with respect to international affairs. In particular, I provide extensive analysis of how much time the committees spent on public and secret hearings, what factors influenced their decisions to engage in oversight, and how they allocated their efforts to routine program review compared to scrutiny of crises and scandals. The empirical results and case studies suggest that the Senate’s national security committees had an uneven record over the sixty-two years of the study that reflected the personal and political agendas of the members rather than the interests of the public. I use the findings, therefore, as a basis for rethinking the nature of national security oversight and proposing several reforms to promote public deliberation and education about U.S. foreign relations.

Overall, I find that the committees’ official oversight activity during the sixty-two years of the study was greater than many political observers recognized, but declined markedly since the mid-1990s. Broad institutional changes in the Senate altered the frequency of hearings among all Senate committees, as well as Armed Services and Foreign Relations. The result was less time available for formal oversight, which affect both the amount and type of scrutiny of the executive branch.

Moreover, I uncover various types of bias in how the national security committees reviewed the executive branch. The orientations of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees led to striking differences in the frequency, content, and venues for oversight hearings. Armed Services, for example, tended to shield Republican administrations from public scrutiny of routine program implementation and crisis management, while Foreign Relations heightened broad inquiries into the “state of the world” during periods of divided government. Both committees reacted strategically to changes in federal spending priorities, to the president’s use of force, and to major events. Over the period of study, then, oversight activity frequently deviated from orderly processes of review.

Finally, committee concerns about the reputations of the parties inhibited their capacity to generate information regarding the costs of war and incidents of bureaucratic wrongdoing. Both committees were most concerned with inquiries into administrative actions that were of interest to organized constituencies rather than the consequences of foreign policy decisions that citizens cared about. The frequency and content of oversight hearings by Armed Services and Foreign Relations consequently were only weakly connected to public opinion and deliberation about the nation’s collective goals in U.S. foreign policy.

On the basis of such wide-ranging results, I conclude that a serious overhaul of these key Senate committees is necessary. I devote the last two chapters of the book, therefore, to proposing changes to the status quo. I outline expectations for national security oversight to restore the balance between the legislative and executive branches consistent with the U.S. constitutional system. I then review current proposals for reform and develop pragmatic incentives for committees to promote the rule of law in international affairs through regular, formal sessions modeled on aspects of a British-style Question Period.

OVERSIGHT AND DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

Oversight is integral to constitutional principles regarding the rule of law and public accountability. Article I, which defines the powers of Congress, contains no mention of the term, but the framers’ debate at the Constitutional Convention made it clear that lawmakers would meet frequently to make sure that the president faithfully executed the law as his oath of office required.⁶ The separation of powers establishes boundaries between the three branches of government, while the system of checks and balances depends on shared powers that enable one branch to resist encroachments on its prerogatives by another. Formal oversight supports the Constitution’s design by monitoring whether the executive follows congressional intent and by bringing the public and the press into the review process. In these ways, oversight facilitates maintenance of the borders between the legislature and executive and offers a potent tool for reining in an incompetent or overly aggressive president.⁷

Although oversight frequently exposes administrative failure or presidential overreaching, it also uncovers the need for a new sequence of policy making, implementation, and evaluation. Consequently, formal congressional review fosters adherence to legitimate procedures for doing the government’s business.⁸ Such “regular order” serves the rule of law by promoting predictability, continuity, and transparency in governmental decision making.

Oversight is critical, as well, to the framers’ idea of representative democracy, which requires extensive deliberation to forge consensus in a diverse nation. Since the nation’s founding, the legislative branch has participated in defining the public sphere in both domestic policy and foreign affairs.⁹ As Madison affirmed in Federalist 10, elected representatives have responsibility to “refine and enlarge the public view” in order to discover common interests.¹⁰ By flagging salient issues and bringing administrators into conversation with members, oversight organizes public discourse about governmental objectives and performance.

Oversight takes many forms in Congress, however. Individual lawmakers issue press releases, give speeches, and appear on television and radio to draw attention to an agency blunder or to challenge a president’s decision.¹¹ They deploy staff members to solve constituent problems with federal programs, and they contact agency officials to ensure that their states or districts obtain governmental resources. They offer advice about policy implementation to department heads through informal channels or communicate privately with the White House. These personal activities constitute an important means of informal negotiation between the branches over policy choices, and they often develop into quasi-permanent issue networks.

To coordinate lawmakers’ attention to governmental programs, however, Congress needs institutions, which not only magnify legislative influence over the executive branch but also increase presidential accountability. Organizational support for formal oversight occurs through specialized committees that exercise responsibility over specific policy domains and, since 1946, have been required by law to monitor the executive on behalf of the entire legislature. As agents of the House and Senate, committees represent the collective interests of the institution and consequently enjoy special authority and command formidable resources. Their professional staff members bring expertise and continuity to scrutiny of the executive, and their subpoena power reinforces the ability to call witnesses to testify. Committee-based oversight thus exerts substantial pressure on administration officials to disclose information in ways that most individual lawmakers cannot.

The elevated status of committees inside Congress suits them admirably to educate the public through oversight.¹² They have the means to organize discussion about complex problems and the discretion to examine agency activities in depth. By including members of both parties and allocating staff to the minority, committees bring competing viewpoints into a common space. As authoritative actors who affect government policy, they attract the news media and influence the frame reporters apply to policy deliberations. Generally, the information committees generate has proven to be of higher quality than the views members bring to floor debates.¹³ Furthermore, the attributes of committee-led discourse contrast favorably with the disposition of the press toward “soft” news and the tendency among individual lawmakers to avoid educating constituents in favor of credit claiming and casework.¹⁴

Formal committee hearings are the most important form of congressional oversight of the executive branch in terms of both the rule of law and public understanding. Although committees ge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Information, Regular Order, and Democratic Accountability in International Affairs
• Part II: Oversight Hearings and Regular Order in U.S. Foreign Relations
• Part III: Reclaiming Congressional War Powers
• Appendix A: Coding Congressional Committee Hearings
• Appendix B: Description of Dependent and Independent Variables
• Appendix C: Methodological Appendix to Chapter 3
• Appendix D: Methodological Appendix to Chapter 4
• Appendix E: Methodological Appendix to Chapter 5
• References
• Index