“Congress’s oversight function has atrophied in a unitary Republican landscape,” New York Times readers were told in an Op-Ed on Nov. 12. Surely the writer was impressively credentialed: He’s Stanley Brand, a former general counsel to the House of Representatives under Speaker Tip O’Neill. But like most such critics Brand omitted a major point: The press all but ignored the atrophying from its onset long ago. This site has not been among those critics, self-serving though it is to say so. Below is a capsule summary of a piece that focused on the Food and Drug Administration and that was posted here in May of last year:

For about 20 years starting in the mid-1960-s, former House investigator Daniel Sigelman once wrote, House and Senate subcommittees “meticulously probed the regulatory histories of dubious drugs, uncovered FDA weaknesses and ordered corrections.” But starting in the late 1980s–while the Democrats were still in charge–oversight of the FDA and the drug industry became increasingly lax and collapsed utterly in 1995, when the Republicans gained control of the House. There, oversight remained moribund; in the Senate, in recent years, a sharp FDA critic, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), emerged.

But meanwhile, just in the decade ending in the Fall of 2002, 13 dangerous drugs were pulled off the market after causing hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. Yet House leaders didn’t investigate how and why the FDA had rushed approval of a single one of these medicines, or why withdrawals had been slow. In 2005, Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who had but didn’t exercise FDA oversight jurisdiction, became the highly-paid president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.

GOP Congressional leaders created a furor over a single death, Terry Schiavo’s, while ignoring the FDA’s role in thousands of deaths.

The press covered the furor fully while remaining indifferent to Congress’s betrayal of its constitutional responsibility to oversee the FDA. The betrayal and the indifference was each a symptom of far broader failures.