Congressional intelligence oversight: The electoral disconnection

Intelligence and National Security

Volumn 25, Issue 6, 2010, Pages 744-766

  Zegart, Amy ^a   Quinn, Julie ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79958291165     PISSN: 02684527     EISSN: 17439019     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2010.537871     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp.165-79.
2. Barry R. Weingast and Mark J. Moran, 'Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission', Journal of Political Economy, 91 (1983) pp.475-520.
3. Kathleen Bawn, 'Political Control Versus Expertise: Congressional Choices About Administrative Procedures', American Political Science Review 89/1 (1995) pp.62-73.
4. Kathleen Bawn, 'Choosing Strategies to Control the Bureaucracy: Statutory Constraints, Oversight and the Committee System', Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 13 (1997) pp.101-26.
5. Terry M. Moe, 'The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure', in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson (eds.) Can the Government Govern? (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1989).
6. McNollgast, 'Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control', Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3 (1987) pp.243-77.
7. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990).
8. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp.165-79.
9. Barry R. Weingast and Mark J. Moran, 'Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission', Journal of Political Economy 91/5 (1983) pp.475-520.
10. Kathleen Bawn, 'Political Control Versus Expertise: Congressional Choices About Administrative Procedures', American Political Science Review 89/1 (1995) pp.62-73.
11. David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making Under Separate Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999).
12. For an alternate view of Congressional control and oversight, and how Congress does neither when monitoring the intelligence agencies, see Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64/1 (2004).
13. David Mayhew, The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974).
14. Harry Howe Ransom, 'Congress and the Intelligence Agencies', Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 32/1 (1975) p.162.
15. The latest such declaration occurred on 29 April 2009, when House intelligence committee Chairman, Silvester Reyes, sent an open letter to the CIA and its employees. 'One important lesson to me from the CIA's interrogation operations involves congressional oversight, ' Reyes wrote. 'I'm going to examine closely ways in which we can change the law to make our own oversight of CIA more meaningful; I want to move from mere notification to real discussion. Good oversight can lead to a partnership, and that's what I am looking to bring about.' Letter from Chairman Reyes to the Director of the CIA dated 29 April 2009 available at http://video1.washingtontimes.com/video/CIAletter.pdf (accessed 21 September 2009), p.2.
16. st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1996).
17. U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Hart-Rudman Commission), Road Map For National Security: Imperative for Change, Phase III Report, http://www.au.af.mil./au/awc/awcgate/nssg/phaseIIIfr.pdf, 15 February 2001.
18. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
19. Final Report of the Commission on The Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 31 March 2005. Available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/wmd_report.pdf
20. Council on Foreign Relations, Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence (New York: Council on Foreign Relations 1996).
21. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, (Washington, DC: GPO 1996).
22. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Hearing on Congressional Oversight, 110th Congress, 1st session, 13 November 2007.
23. John D. Huber and Charles R. Shipan, 'The Costs of Control: Legislators, Agencies, and Transaction Costs', Legislative Studies Quarterly XXV 1 (2000) pp.25-52.
24. Barry R. Weingast and Mark J. Moran, 'Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission', Journal of Political Economy, 91 No. 5 (1983) pp.475-520.
25. Terry M. Moe, 'An Assessment of the Positive Theory of Congressional Dominance', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 12 (1987) pp.475-520.
26. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990).
27. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp.165-179.
28. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, (New York: Oxford University Press 2006).
29. The literature does not argue that all policy areas are alike. Many scholars have noted that Congress would be expected to oversee less in policy issues that command low public salience or feature high degrees of complexity. See for example Evan J. Ringqist, Jeff Worsham, and Marc Allen Eisner, 'Salience, Complexity, and the Legislative Direction of Regulatory Bureaucracies', Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 13/2 (2003) pp.141-64. Bawn (1997) finds notable differences in preferences about statutory control between committee members and non-members, with committee members favoring lower statutory controls built into the design of agencies within their jurisdiction, and non-members favoring greater statutory controls. Beyond these more general treatments, however, the literature does not dive deeply into the empirics of how oversight varies across policy domains.
30. Loch K. Johnson, 'Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Skeptics, and Guardians: Role Selection by Congressional Intelligence Overseers', SAIS Review XXVIII/1 (2008) p.106.
31. John F. Bibby, 'Congress' Neglected Function', in Melvin R. Laird (ed.) The Republican Papers (New York: Praeger 1968).
32. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (New York: Oxford University Press 2006).
33. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp.165-79.
34. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984), p.166.
35. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984), p.166.
36. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984), p.166.
37. David Mayhew, The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974).
38. Matthew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, 'Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms', American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp.166-7.
39. Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64/1 (2004) p.4.
40. citing Jerrold L. Walden, 'The C.I.A.: A Study in the Arrogation of Administrative Power', George Washington Law Review 39/3 (1970) pp.66-101.
41. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Intelligence: A Consumer's Guide, 2009. Available at http://www.dni.gov/reports/ic_consumers_guide_2009.pdf
42. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990).
43. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990), pp.219-30.
44. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990), p.104.
45. Notably, he also does not include intelligence among his committee selections so it is impossible to know whether congressional oversight of the Intelligence Community proved more active, less active or about the same as Congress's oversight more generally during the same period (Aberbach 1990, 219-30), a topic we examine more below.
46. Amy B. Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007).
47. Frank J. Smist, Jr., Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 1947-1994, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1994).
48. Marvin C. Ott, 'Partisanship and the Decline of Intelligence Oversight', International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 16 (2003) pp.69-94.
49. For an exception, see Jennifer Kibbe, 'Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Is the Solution Part of the Problem?', Intelligence and National Security 25/1 (February 2010), pp.24-49.
50. Frank J. Smist, Jr., Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 1947-1994, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1994) p.13.
51. Frank J. Smist, Jr., Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 1947-1994, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1994), p.19.
52. Frank J. Smist, Jr., Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 1947-1994, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1994), p.19.
53. L. Brit Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA's Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence 2008) pp. xiv-xv.
54. David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2005), p.458.
55. David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2005), p.460.
56. Loch K. Johnson, 'The Contemporary Presidency', Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (2004) p.835.
57. Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64/1 (2004) p.4.
58. Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64/1 (2004) p.4.
59. Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64/1 (2004) p.4.
60. Loch K. Johnson, 'Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Skeptics, and Guardians: Role Selection by Congressional Intelligence Overseers', SAIS Review XXVIII/1 (2008) pp.93-108.
61. Loch K. Johnson, 'The Contemporary Presidency', Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34 (2004) pp.828-837.
62. Loch K. Johnson, 'Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee', Public Administration Review 64 (2004) pp.3-14.
63. Loch K. Johnson, 'The U.S. Congress and the CIA: Monitoring the Dark Side of Government', Legislative Studies Quarterly, 5 (1980) pp.477-99.
64. Kathleen Bawn, 'Choosing Strategies to Control the Bureaucracy: Statutory Constraints, Oversight and the Committee System', Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 13 (1997) pp.101-126.
65. Terry M. Moe, 'The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure', in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson (eds.) Can the Government Govern?, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1989).
66. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999).
67. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1990).
68. Barry R. Weingast and Mark J. Moran, 'Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission', Journal of Political Economy 91/5 (1983) pp.475-520.
69. Prestige committees are considered the most desirable assignments and include committees such as Appropriations and Ways and Means. Policy committees deal with issues of national importance, including Banking, Finance, Commerce, Foreign Affairs and Judiciary. Constituency committees serve a critical district need and include Agriculture, Merchant Marine and Fisheries and Veterans' Affairs, to name a few. Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Congressmen in Committees (Boston: Little, Brown 1973).
70. Indeed, hearings lie at the heart of Congressional oversight, offering Congressmen the opportunity to stake out a public position on an issue, signaling to agencies what issues need to be prioritized, and providing valuable information about agency activities and challenges. In a survey of top congressional staffers, more than forty percent said that they 'keep track of what is going on in the programs and agencies by using information transmitted' in hearings (Aberbach 1990, 87). As one congressional staffer put it, 'most of what we do in oversight is through the asking of questions.' (Interview August 20, 2009).
71. We constructed our own dataset rather than using Baumgartner and Jones's Policy Agendas Project data in order to capture and examine more granular level data pertinent to this ongoing project. Our dataset, for example, notes whether hearings are classified or unclassified, enabling us to compare the openness of oversight activity levels over time. In addition, our dataset codes for all committee meetings, which include briefings, business meetings, hearings, and other activities, which enables us to compare various types of oversight activities across committees. Finally, the Policy Agendas Project data starts and ends with Congressional Information Service (CIS) abstracts. By covering a narrow set of committees, we were able to go deeper, supplementing CIS abstracts (and cleaning up a sizeable number of CIS coding errors) with more detailed data about hearing topics obtained from the committees' staffs, committee web sites, and committee reports.
72. It should be noted that our Intelligence Committee hearing data includes both 'open' hearings that are unclassified and 'closed' hearings that are held in classified session.
73. Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy, (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1950).
74. James N. Rosenau, ed. Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, (New York: Random House 1961).
75. Barry Hughes, The Domestic Content of American Foreign Policy, (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman 1978).
76. Paul C. Light and Celinda Lake, 'The Election: Candidates, Strategies, and Decision' in Michael Nelson (ed.) The Elections of 1984, (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press 1985). Aldrich, Sullivan and Borgida take on this prevailing view, arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policy are in fact available and that they influence voter's choices.
77. John A. Aldrich, John L. Sullivan and Eugene Borgida, 'Foreign Affairs and Issue Voting: Do Presidential Candidates 'Waltz Before a Blind Audience?', American Political Science Review 83/1 (1989), pp.123-41.
78. Data from Los Angeles Times National Election Day exit polls 8 November 1988 (Poll # 1988-171), 3 November 1992 (Poll #303), 5 November 1996 (Poll #389), 7 November 2000 (Poll #449), 3 November 2004 (Poll # 513), available at http://roperweb.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/presidential/presidential_election.html.
79. 2008 exit poll data from CNN, available at http://www.cnn.com/election/2008/results/polls/#USPOOp1
80. Interview, 2 August 1995.
81. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, (Washington, DC: GPO 1996).
82. Keith Krehbiel, Information and Legislative Organization, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1991).
83. Kenneth Shepsle, The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978).
84. Barry R. Weingast and William Marshall, 'The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets', Journal of Political Economy 96 (1988) pp.132-63.
85. Only two of the 535 members in the 111th Congress have ever worked at an intelligence agency: Representatives Chris Carney (D-PA), who served as an intelligence analyst in the Pentagon, and Mike Rogers (R-MI), who spent six years as an FBI agent.
86. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, (Washington, DC: GPO 1996).
87. Interview 19 August 2009.
88. Tracking and measuring the interest group/lobbyist environment is inherently problematic. There are no consensus definitions for the terms 'interest group' and 'lobbyist' and there are no datasets that capture all organizations. For our purposes, we use Jack L. Walker's broad definition of an interest group and we include both indicators-interest groups and lobbyists-to get the fullest, most complete picture. Jack L. Walker, Mobilizing Interest Groups in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1991).
89. Groups we considered 'unlikely to be involved in intelligence' include Sister Cities International and Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies USA and totaled 325.
90. Center for Responsive Politics, 2009. Available at http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php.
91. David Mayhew, The Electoral Connection, (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974), p.140.
92. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1965).
93. David Mayhew, The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974), p.146.
94. See also Loch K. Johnson, 'A Shock Theory of Congressional Accountability for Intelligence', in Loch K. Johnson (ed.) Handbook of Intelligence Studies (New York: Routledge 2007) pp.343-60.
95. In the 111th Congress only five committees mandate term limits: House Intelligence, House and Senate Budget Committees and the House and Senate Committees on Standards of Official Conduct. See Guide to Congress, 6th ed., Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press 2008).
96. Term limits were abolished in S. Res. 445. See Richard F. Grimmett, '9/11 Commission Recommendations: Implementation Status', Congressional Research Report RL33742, 4 December 2006.
97. Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (Aspin-Brown Commission), Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1996).
98. Council on Foreign Relations, Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence (New York: Council on Foreign Relations 1996).
99. 'Movers and shakers' in the House are defined as: The Majority Leader, Assistant Majority Leader (Whip), Minority Leader, Assistant Minority Leader (Whip), Chairmen and Ranking Members of all committees and all members of the Appropriations, Rules and Ways and Means Committees. We did not include the Speaker of the House because she does not ordinarily serve on other committees. Senate 'movers and shakers' include the President Pro Tempore, Majority Leader, Assistant Majority Leader (Whip), Minority Leader, Assistant Minority Leader (Whip), Chairmen and Ranking Members of all standing committees, and all members of the Appropriations Committee.
100. For more on Huber and Shipman's call to subject the theoretical literature to better empirical tests, see John D. Huber and Charles R. Shipan, 'The Costs of Control: Legislators, Agencies, and Transaction Costs', Legislative Studies Quarterly XXV/1 (2000) pp.25-52.