Government Executive’s Elizabeth Newell dishes on Congress’s watchdog committee:

Less than six months after pledging to reverse the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s history of rancorous partisanship, the relationship between the chairman, Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., and ranking member Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has become contentious.

On Thursday, committee Republicans issued a letter saying they supported Issa in his demands to hold committee hearings to investigate the security failings that led to the attempted terrorist attack on Dec. 25. The Republicans accused Towns of creating suspicion that the administration will “escape serious oversight and accountability” because of party loyalty.

A couple of points about the House oversight committee. First, this is effectively Congress’s only committee to investigate executive branch performance. The Senate has an oversight committee, but it’s oddly subsumed under the Homeland Security Committee. And it’s chaired by Joseph Lieberman, who has historically been too busy doing Joe Lieberman-like things to seriously investigate the president.

Second, now would seem the perfect time for bipartisan cooperation on investigations. Perhaps not so much the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day. But the performance of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve in handling the financial crisis, the Pentagon in managing the Iraq and Afghanistan War, and the Justice Department in prosecuting the “war on terror” are all matters that call into question the performance of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Also, many Democrats, including those on the oversight committee, don’t support or are ambivalent about Obama’s policies in all of these areas.

In other words, there’s not a clean Democratic-Republican divide on many of the biggest issues of the day. They are ripe to be investigated by ambitious and farsighted members of Congress. For the most part, though, that’s not happening.

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