Legislative Hearings Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Legislative hearings are the primary institutional mechanism for collecting information about policy-related issues from a variety of actors, including Congress, the executive branch, interest groups, and citizens. Most frequently conducted on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, witnesses run the gamut from executive branch officials to interest group lobbyists to academic experts to current and former congressional members and staffers to ordinary citizens. Preparation for legislative hearings on the part of witnesses as well as committee staff members typically is intensive. Staffers prepare notebooks of pertinent information for committee members and interview prospective witnesses.

Some interest groups, such as the American Medical Association, testify fairly routinely before Congress. While many hearings garner relatively little attention except from the interested parties, others have made witnesses and congressional committee members household names. These include Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the Iran-contra hearings in 1987 and U.S. senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), who chaired the committee that investigated campaign finance activities related to the 1972 Watergate break-in. Republican Richard M. Nixon of California parlayed his questioning of witnesses appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee into a path to successful bids for the U.S. Senate, vice presidency, and presidency. U.S. senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), as a member of the committee chaired by U.S. senator John McClellan (D-AR) that investigated labor racketeering, gained much favorable publicity that assisted his successful 1960 presidential bid.

Television coverage of legislative hearings first became prominent in 1952, the same year television sets became fixtures in one-half of U.S. households. U.S. senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) parlayed his chairing of crime hearings into the 1956 Democratic vice presidential nomination. More than twenty years later, ranking Watergate committee member U.S. senator Howard Baker Jr. (R-TN) became famous to millions of television viewers for asking, «What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Baker went on to unsuccessfully seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Fred Thompson, minority counsel to the committee, went on to later fill the U.S. Senate seat previously held by Baker and to make a bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Other memorable televised legislative hearings included the 1991 confirmation hearings for the nomination of Clarence Thomas to fill the position of associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court made available by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall. Sexual harassment allegations lodged against Thomas by Professor Anita Hill made for riveting television in sessions chaired by U.S. senator Joseph Biden, who went on to be vice president of the United States.

More legislative hearings are conducted at the subcommittee level than at the full committee level. The prospect of a bill being enacted or a resolution adopted by a legislative chamber will be enhanced considerably if it is scheduled for a hearing by the chair of the committee within whose jurisdiction it falls. The power of committees to issue subpoenas to witnesses enhances the oversight and investigatory capacities of committees. Effective testimony at a hearing can mightily enhance a bill’s chances of becoming a law or a resolution’s being adopted by a chamber of Congress. For example, the U.S. House of Representatives heard testimony from three former “comfort women” from Korea, who had been girls forced into the sexual service of members of the Japanese military during the Japanese colonial period that ended with the conclusion of World War II in 1945.Thanks to their testimony on February 15, 2007, House Resolution 121 called on “the government of Japan to apologize for its war crime enslaving over 200,000 girls and women during World War II as ‘comfort women.’” This resolution was followed by others from Canada, the European Union, and the Netherlands.

Testimony also can be perilous for the careers of witnesses. Alberto Gonzales resigned his position as U.S. attorney general and subsequently retained defense counsel because of his testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee concerning matters including the firings of U.S. attorneys, warrantless wiretaps, and the detention of “enemy combatants” in 2007.

In addition to helping Congress perform its oversight of the executive branch function, information gleaned from hearings is important for establishing legislative histories. An excellent example is when U.S. senator Tom Connally (D-TX) secured the agreement of U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson that the NATO treaty did not confer the power of unilaterally taking the nation to war on the president. Such a record buttresses arguments, such as those put forth by Louis Fisher, that Congress has subsequently unilaterally abdicated for all practical purposes its constitutional responsibility to declare war to the peril of the United States and the rule of law. Representative government is made possible by the information that legislative hearings make available about government to the citizenry.

Bibliography:

Diermeier, Daniel, and Timothy J. Feddersen. “Information and Congressional Hearings.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (January 2000): 51–65.
Fisher, Louis. Congressional Abdication on War and Spending. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
“The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2009.” U.S. House. Statement Appearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, May 14, 2009.
Howell,William G., and Douglas L. Kriner. “Congress, the President, and the Iraq War’s Domestic Political Front.” In Congress Reconsidered, edited by Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, 311–335.Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009.
LeLoup, Lance T., and Steven A. Shull. The President and Congress: Collaboration and Combat in National Policymaking. New York: Longman, 2003.
Oleszek,Walter J. Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process. 7th ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2007.
Payne, James L. “The Rise of Lone Wolf Questioning in House Committee Hearings.” Polity 14 (Summer 1982): 626–640.

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