More Do-nothing/do-damage

The Senate majority leader is a physician right? I suppose, "first of all, do no harm" only applies to medical ethics, huh? Here's one more story from "The Worst Congress Ever" (no real surprises here, but. . . .):

In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress -- and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.

The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.

Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.

And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history. [My emphasis]

My own sense of the contrst arises out of my recollection from years ago that in the Iran-Contra investigation, the Democrats in Congress appointed a conservative Republican special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh (interestingly, the Executive's handling of Iran-Contra may have been a strategic proving ground for the current administration-- see this 1997 article)-- to avoid the appearance of a mere partisan witch-hunt. In contrast, of course, the Republicans chose the highly antagonistic partisan Kenneth Starr to pursue Clinton and co. Of course, these people like witch-hunts. And therein lies the difference.