Not a sexy topic

Not a sexy topic, but way more important than you might think: the decline of Congressional oversight. It’s one of Congress’s key roles in our system of checks and balances. But it’s a role that has largely been abdicated by the Republican Congress. During the 1990s, the sort of meticulous but often unsexy work of oversight of the executive branch departments and agencies was pushed aside to make way for high-octane but mostly nonsensical scandal investigations. Under Bush, it’s been shunted aside even more because serious oversight sounds too much like criticism, which must of course be avoided at all costs. The Post has a nice, though too brief, piece on the subject.