This seems like as good a time as any for Congress to put together a serious commission focused on what went right, what went wrong and what needs to change about the way the country handles pandemics. It’s going to be hard to do, because the current presidential administration isn’t going to want a thorough examination of its mistakes and the previous administration is hostile to the whole concept of oversight, accountability, transparency, and, for that matter, professionalism in government.
So it’s probably up to a bipartisan group in Congress to take the initiative. Elaine Kamarck, the Brookings Institution public policy scholar, made the case for this some time ago and others have joined in from time to time, but there’s more need for it now. There is a bipartisan bill moving through the Senate that would set up a commission and take several other steps to prevent future damage, but the Senate can’t even manage to complete its work on current funding, let alone long-term planning.
It’s not just about gridlock. A nonpartisan commission is needed because Congress can’t handle the work on its own. For both parties, congressional oversight has too often become nothing more than a game of embarrassing presidents from the other party — which means that during periods of unified government, oversight moves low on the priority list except when it’s possible to use it to attack.
Oversight at the best of times has a bit of show-horse aspect to it — recall the late Senator John McCain’s hearing in which baseball players were grilled over steroid use. But also recall that Senator Harry Truman’s big claim to fame and launching pad to higher office was his chairmanship in the early 1940s of a special committee to investigate war profiteering, despite the fact that he and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were both Democrats.
In the 1940s, and well into the 1970s at least, Democrats in Congress did not feel that their main job was to make Democrats in the White House look good. I think that was also true of Senate Republicans in the 1980s, when they had the majority and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. But by the time George W. Bush was president, the impulse for self-promotion through oversight even at the cost of a same-party scandal had faded, and it hasn’t really returned — or if it has, congressional party leadership is able to squash it.
Or, perhaps, committee and subcommittee chairs no longer have the skills, even if they had the interest. We still get the occasional tough question, but full investigations by congressional committees into malfeasance in the executive branch during periods of unified government are rarer and rarer. Especially on the Republican side, serious investigations even of Democratic administrations take a back seat to shoddily researched circuses. Things are only somewhat better when Democrats are investigating Republicans.
The truth is that a lot of the concerns congressional leaders have are misplaced. Sure, an oversight committee that discovered criminal malfeasance in the Oval Office would be a big deal. But most of what happens in government takes place far from the White House, and voters typically don’t pay much attention to scandals that don’t personally involve the president — and have very short memories of even substantial problems involving people presidents have nominated to their positions.
Reagan’s first term was filled with well-publicized scandals. That was no match for a booming economy in his 1984 re-election landslide, no matter how often Democrats accused him of running a corrupt administration. It’s hard to see how any of the cabinet scandals during the Donald Trump presidency had any effect on his popularity.
One could make the case that decreased oversight yields complacency, if not outright corruption, and in the long run presidents and their parties are better off when they know that Congress takes the task seriously because it gives them a strong incentive to do their jobs well. But modern presidents and parties don’t subscribe to that logic, unfortunately.
At any rate, Congress isn’t going to suddenly remember how to do its job, so bipartisan commissions on the model of the September 11 panel are probably the best hope. Even then, we could expect quite a bit of resistance from Trump and those around him, and perhaps also from President Joe Biden. But it should happen nonetheless, and it would be good to see Biden endorse the idea and then cooperate with the investigation.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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