Motion to Go to Conference on H.R. 2528, Military Quality of Life and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2006
MOTION TO GO TO CONFERENCE ON H.R. 2528, MILITARY QUALITY OF LIFE AND VETERANS AFFAIRS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2006 -- (House of Representatives - November 03, 2005)
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Mr. WAXMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.
Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, one of the most important jobs for Congress is not just to pass laws but to see how the laws are working. We need to do oversight and to have investigations. The Constitution envisioned we would do this when they had us as a separate branch, and this is a way to provide the checks and balances that our Government was supposed to have in order to avoid the concentration of power in any one branch of Government.
We have an executive branch that wants to act as secretly as possible. They do not want openness. They do not want transparency. They do not even want to hear alternative points of view.
I believe that the President of the United States surrounds himself with people who tell him exactly what he wants to hear, and the Republicans who run the Congress are abetting that. They are helping him avoid getting a full discussion of the issues when Congress does not pursue oversight and investigations.
Now there are many things that this Congress has failed to do. They have failed to look at the manipulation of intelligence by the President and others working for him in the prelude to the war. We have not had any hearings on that.
They have failed to look at the issues of how we are spending the taxpayers' money on some of these contracts in Iraq, for Katrina and others. They really are not doing the diligent job that needs to be done.
The Congress of the United States has even refused to look at and find out why we were not given information from the executive branch about the costs of the Medicaid prescription drug bill. A civil service actuary in the administration was prohibited from giving Congress that information. You would think that Democrats and Republicans would be outraged. Yet the Republicans who run the Congress refuse to hold hearings on this.
Oversight is very important, and it stands today in stark contrast to the way they are behaving with the way the Republicans handled oversight when President Clinton was in power. There was not an accusation too small for them to ignore. They ran and called hearings. They issued subpoenas. They brought people into a private room to take depositions. The Congress of the United States held more days, I believe it was over a week of public hearings, on whether President Clinton misused his Christmas card list for political purpose. Yet we cannot get them to hold a hearing on the manipulation of intelligence to get us into a war.
I think that when a Congress does not do its oversight, in effect what they are doing is covering things up. They are not letting the American people know what its government is doing. This is not the government of the Republican Party. This is not the government of President Clinton. It is a government that belongs to the people of the United States, and our democracy cannot work if there is no accountability and transparency.
We have never heard of anyone in this administration fired for doing a poor job. In fact, if they do a poor enough job, they get elevated. They even get a Medal of Freedom award. No one was fired, no one was held accountable for the failure to have accurate intelligence before we went into the war. No one has been fired for anything that is been done improperly by this administration. It is as if it did not happen.
I think the Republicans believe if you do not have oversight, no one knows about the problem; therefore, the problem never existed. Well, I think it is wrong. We have a responsibility and it is time that we speak out loudly and clearly to insist that the Congress of the United States live up to that responsibility.
Mr. Speaker, I support the motion of the gentleman.
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