Most disturbingly, an Economic and Consumer Policy Committee will presumably allow Cummings to fulfill the Democrats’ wish to expand their limited oversight jurisdiction over the federal government into broad oversight of the entire U.S. economy. This committee in particular will be helpful in targeting (and conceivably destroying) private companies and organizations that do not align with the Democrat agenda. Alternatively, it can be used to back up Financial Services Committee chairman Maxine Waters’s efforts to target deep-pocketed financial institutions whose fines Democrats hope to use for public funding of political campaigns.
Sacred Cows: Protecting Federal Employees
Each new committee chairman brings certain priorities—often those that impact the constituents back home. That’s generally a good thing. In my case, I represented a large geographic area that was rural. The vast majority of land in this country is rural and I felt rural communities were not getting enough attention in the United States Congress. I created the Interior Subcommittee to address issues ranging from rural economies to tribal issues and from grazing to energy. There were many issues I felt were getting glossed over or didn’t neatly fit in other committees.
Likewise, Chairman Cummings will be able to prioritize the things that matter in his district. I have no objection to that. He and I visited one another’s districts in 2013. He learned a lot about public lands. I learned about inner-city challenges like intergenerational poverty.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid the home constituency that will matter most to committee Democrats will be the one that writes the biggest checks.
Chairman Cummings’s home state of Maryland in 2018 had 144,542 federal employees according to figures published by Governing magazine. Cummings’s district includes anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 of those, depending on whether retirees are counted. Taking care of federal employees is and always has been a high priority for Democrats in general and for Chairman Cummings in particular. Yet his job as Oversight Committee chairman is theoretically to expose waste, fraud, and abuse within that very constituency.
He isn’t the only one.
Pelosi has inexplicably stacked the Oversight Committee with members from districts with heavy concentrations of federal employees. Doesn’t it seem strange that the Democrats would choose people to oversee federal mismanagement who are beholden to the very people they must hold accountable? If you really want effective oversight, wouldn’t you choose someone less vulnerable to such conflicts? You would if you actually intended to conduct effective oversight of the federal employee population.
For example, the Government Operations Subcommittee, which traditionally investigates much of the wrongdoing by federal employees, is now chaired by Virginia representative Gerry Connolly, whose 11th District has more federal employees than any other district in America, save Washington, D.C. (whose delegate in Congress, Eleanor Holmes-Norton, incidentally also serves on the Oversight Committee). Connolly literally cannot win reelection without the support of federal employees. His donor list reflects this reality, with public sector unions consistently numbering among his top contributors.
Why is he the man Democrats chose to investigate the operations of the federal government? Because when it comes to the federal employees who predominantly vote Democrat and whose unions donate richly and almost exclusively to her caucus, Speaker Pelosi doesn’t want Connolly there to play offense. He’s there to play defense. We’ll still see him play offense—against President Trump and his appointees. He’ll be aggressive and persuasive on those issues. But we won’t see him go anywhere near the systemic problems in the civil service.
In my experience, Connolly was sympathetic to individual cases of wrongdoing brought up by Republicans. He was not happy about Environmental Protection Agency employees who spent hours of every day watching porn on their office computers or National Park Service managers who sexually harassed women they supervised. But he was never interested in systemic solutions like giving agencies more power to fire the bad apples in their ranks, nor was he one to draw attention to such cases. I don’t see him using his authority to shine a light on situations that might reflect poorly on federal employees. Fearful of upsetting federal employee unions, he will handle the civil service with kid gloves.
I learned during my tenure that there is no such thing as an offense committed by a federal employee that is severe enough to rattle federal employee unions. They will simply never concede that behavior of one of their members rises to a level justifying rule or policy changes. Connolly will never cross those unions.
Lying in a Bed of Their Own Making
We may actually see some chickens come home to roost for congressional Democrats after they stood against their own institution during the Obama administration. They stood by supportively while the Obama administration ran roughshod over our congressional subpoena authority and while it invoked an unprecedented expansion of executive privilege.
Though the Trump administration has not as yet gone to the same audacious lengths the Obama administration went to withhold information, Democrats will have a hard time enforcing subpoena compliance or piercing executive privilege without intervention from the courts, a process that could take many years to come to fruition.
During the Obama administration, the government routinely ignored our subpoenas. They claimed executive privilege, even for documents that had never previously enjoyed such protection. When they did produce requested documents, those were often either heavily redacted or they were copies of publicly available documents we could have downloaded from a government website. They were seldom responsive to our document requests and often rejected our demands to hear from government witnesses. To remember how Democrats responded to these practices, the case of the Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation is instructive.
Republicans in early 2011 sought records pertaining to the failed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) program that allegedly facilitated the flow of thousands of weapons to drug cartels across the U.S.-Mexico border. The Obama administration withheld 15,000 documents, inappropriately claiming executive privilege, while simultaneously arguing the president had never been briefed on the operation. This was a completely new and expanded use of executive privilege to shield documents the president had never even seen. I believe in executive privilege, but how can it be invoked when the chief executive was not directly involved? Yet it was.
We attempted to push back on the expansion of executive privilege and the refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas by introducing a resolution to hold the attorney general in contempt of Congress. Warning our colleagues about the future implications of this vote, we reminded them the resolution wasn’t just about Attorney General Eric Holder or Fast and Furious. It was about protecting the right of congressional committees to access documents in the future.
When the committee voted, not a single Democrat was willing to defend our congressional subpoena authority. When the resolution went to the House floor, some Democrats actually walked off the floor in protest.
In the floor debate on the contempt resolution, Democratic California representative Adam Schiff argued forcefully against the very position he now takes against the Trump administration. He argued:
What we are doing today is simply a partisan abuse of the contempt power. What we do will cause no injury to the department but will cause great injury to this house. The Justice Department, after providing 8,000 documents and extensive testimony is now being required to turn over privileged materials, and like all administrations before it, it has reluctantly used executive privilege to respectfully refuse to provide materials it cannot provide.