(The Sad) State of Play
Yes, that’s me, the sinister looking guy on the left side of the screen. And yes, it’s a real beard. About a year ago, when Kevin MacDonald and his crew were in DC filming the movie “State of Play,” my wife and I showed up at an open casting call for extras. We got called back to do a scene set in a Congressional committee hearing room (actually the old EPA building on Constitution Ave, NW), where Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) grills the CEO of PointCorp (a.k.a. Blackwater) about private contractor abuses in Iraq. For no especially good reason, I got yanked from the crowd to sit in as the CEO’s lawyer, and the rest is, as they say, on the silver screen.
Why am I writing about a Hollywood movie here, on PSA’s bipartisan foreign policy blog? Well, for one thing, I’m in it, and I think it’s worth seeing despite that. It’s a pretty good film, and the twist at the end is better than I expected. But there’s more than that. For those of us who spend our professional lives thinking about good government policy and how it is—or isn’t—made, I think this movie holds an important lesson.
Without spoiling the plot, I can say that the young, idealistic Congressman’s investigation of the shadowy, powerful, paramilitary corporation is very far from a made up scenario. It’s based, of course, on real investigations of waste, fraud, abuse, and even war crimes committed by private citizens whose salaries have been paid by the US government. For more on that, see my fellow Across the Aisle blogger David Isenberg’s recent piece. What’s worse is that in the movie, as in real life, the bad guys don’t get caught, partly because their high-level political connections immunize them from meaningful scrutiny, but much more importantly, because our system for oversight of government action by Congress is fundamentally broken.
With trillions of dollars in new government spending already swelling the coffers of the Executive Branch and two ongoing wars, it is time to get serious about oversight. The President’s appointment of Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney to lead a stimulus oversight team was a fine gesture, but an Executive appointee monitoring Executive spending is like a fox guarding a henhouse. Truly effective oversight will depend on Congress’s willingness to flex some of its Constitutional muscle.
To start, members of Congress need to spend more time at work, and need to work together a lot more. That means restoring a full five-day work week on the Hill, so that members have time for thoughtful, substantive debate on and off the floor, and cannot be corralled into reflexive partisanship by leaders on both sides who abuse rules of procedure to enforce party discipline. In perilous economic times, it is especially critical for lawmakers to draw on wisdom and experience from both sides of the aisle, and to keep an appropriate sense of urgency from begetting rash decisions.
Congress also needs to recommit to its Constitutional role as a check on the Executive Branch, even when the same party controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. When Republicans ran the Hill and the White House, loyalty to the President too often meant complete surrender of Congressional oversight. Because the majority sets the agenda, Democrats must be willing to call President Obama’s appointees to account, and risk exposing minor embarrassments today to avoid major disasters down the road.
To do so, Congress must repair the appropriation and authorization processes. The job of Congressional authorizers is to determine whether the overarching goals and structures of government programs make sense, and to give them legal authority when necessary. The job of the appropriators is to drill down to see just how much programs should cost, and make the right amounts of funding available. But in the age of CSPAN and cable news infotainment, appropriation and authorization hearings have become echo chambers, with members devoting more time and energy to political grandstanding than to ensuring that government programs do the best job for the lowest cost to the taxpayer.
In State of Play, the fictional congressman Stephen Collins is very far from a model of integrity in public service. As you will learn very early in the film, he stands accused (rightly) of having an affair with his research assistant, and (wrongly, it seems) of having her killed to cover it up. But in the real world, we could take a page from Rep. Collins’ book, when he decides to buck party discipline and his own political instincts to confront the shadowy corporate powers abusing public trust. Oversight hearings should not become mere political theater, but the fact that witnesses often bring slick-suited corporate lawyers with them should serve as a reminder that details matter, and many times it is up to Congress to uncover the truth.
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