Talk about Congress cutting funding for the Iraq war has been moving from a mumble to what I expect will be a roar before long. It brings me back to a moment in the spring of 1973 when the House voted to block military aid for South Vietnam, the first step in a series of [...]

Simply by installing “two digital cameras in every committee and subcommittee room,” the House could let citizens go on the Web to view all committee and subcommittee meetings–including oversight hearings–and thus erode “the power of K Street lobbyists who use ‘insider’ information gleaned from committee meetings to justify their fees.” The House could also easily [...]

“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 [...]

Eric Boehlert, Michael Massing, Frank Rich and other critics have rightly raised hell over the mainstream media’s coverage and non-coverage of issues related to the war in Iraq. There was what Boehlert called the “lapdog” reporting of the run-up to the invasion. Then came the burial of devastating post-invasion revelations such as the Downing Street [...]