Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, opposed the panel’s decision last week to issue a subpoena for all White House documents related to the decision to give a $535 million federal loan guarantee to the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar panels manufacturer. Waxman sent a letter to Rep. Fred Upton, the panel’s chairman, urging against issuing the subpoena and noting that “when the investigative interests of Congress confront White House equities, it is the long-standing practice of Congress and the White House to engage in meaningful discussions to attempt mutual accommodation so that Congress can secure information necessary to advance its oversight goals without unduly imposing on executive branch prerogatives.” But Waxman lost no sleep worrying about unduly imposing on executive prerogatives a decade ago when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the White House and his vice president, Dick Cheney, convened an energy task force. Cheney caused an uproar on Capitol Hill and in the liberal mainstream media when he rejected the demand of congressional Democrats, led by Waxman who was then the ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that hundreds of task force documents be made public.
An overly supine Republican majority in Congress chose not to challenge Cheney’s decision, but the Government Accountability Office took the vice president’s energy task force to court. In support of GAO, Waxman wrote to Cheney claiming that the executive branch would be “virtually immune from routine oversight” if the documents GAO sought weren’t made public. Waxman said he doubted the American people would support “radically changing our system of government so that the White House is accountable to no one.”
Waxman’s obvious partisan hypocrisy notwithstanding, Upton and the energy and commerce panel’s Republican members were entirely justified in issuing the subpoena to White House Chief of Staff William Daley and Bruce Reed, Vice President Biden’s chief of staff. Documents obtained in response to a previous committee subpoena have made clear the White House was deeply involved in securing the loan guarantee for Solyndra, and that Obama-appointed officials pressured the Department of Energy to ignore expert warnings that Solyndra was a bad investment. Congress has an undoubted authority to see any government document that might shed light on why the Obama administration sank half-a-billion tax dollars in a company whose principal investor just happened to be a campaign fundraising bundler for the president.
Republicans asked voters in 2010 to return them to the majority in Congress in part because they claimed to have learned from their mistakes during the Bush years, one of the most significant of which was allowing congressional oversight muscles to grow flabby. The bottom line here ought to be this: Congress is the first branch of our federal government and its oversight authority should never be limited by partisan considerations, no matter who is in the White House.
