Accountability for Thee but Not for We

Democrats and progressives embrace yet another double standard

Democracy requires democratic accountability—here but also elsewhere

---

Recently, congressional Republicans released a paper detailing the issues that will be up for scrutiny in the likely event that they gain control of the House of Representatives. These include the COVID-19 pandemic, the Afghanistan withdrawal, immigration policy, Hunter Biden, and accusations of FBI interference in the political process.

You will not be surprised to learn that Democrats and progressives have greeted this announcement with complaints and charges that the GOP is merely trying to distract attention from Democrats’ own investigations of Donald Trump. Here on Substack, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American put it this way:

The House Republicans’ plan was apparently to grab headlines with an apparently big “report” and make people uneasy about the Biden administration. The document makes it clear that their priorities if they take the House will be to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the evacuation of Afghanistan, immigration policies, and, perhaps above all, Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the report is a self-own in that it makes clear that the Republicans have no intention of actually trying to deal with inflation and are instead going to push the investigations that keep their grievances before the media and feed their base.

Before dealing with this claim, I will note that whatever its deficiencies, the Democratic-dominated House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has done valuable work. A key component of democracy is democratic accountability, and this the Committee has furnished by detailing the former president’s responsibility for the events of that day.

But Professor Richardson’s approval of that exercise is not derived from the general principle of democratic accountability. When she writes that House Republicans are merely “going to push the investigations that keep their grievances before the media and feed their base,” she presents us with a clear case of projection.

Whether the Hunter Biden scandal is worthy of congressional attention is arguable. There can, however, be no good-faith argument against an investigation of the Afghanistan debacle. For understandable if hardly admirable political reasons, congressional Democrats have no interest in pursuing such an investigation. But the American people deserve the facts. By what process of decision making did the Biden Administration arrive at a policy that caused such a ghastly and humiliating disaster? What advice was the President given by his foreign policy and military advisers? Why was the Afghan National Army kneecapped by the abrupt cessation of vital logistical support? Why were US troops withdrawn before all American citizens and Afghani allies were accounted for and evacuated? Surely these are pertinent and pressing questions that demand answers.

Nor can there be any reasonable objection to an investigation of the government’s response to and management of the pandemic crisis. That such a probe would be unwelcome to many in government, the public health establishment and public education was made plain by “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” a recent article in The Atlantic. Its author, Professor Emily Oster, concedes that mistakes were made. But she claims to see no point in picking at the wound—which would expose not only honest mistakes but shocking examples of bad judgement, bad faith and plain lying. Professor Oster’s suggested amnesty amounts to a call for a coverup, leaving the lessons of the pandemic crisis unlearned.

Congressional oversight of the federal government is the primary means by which democratic accountability is enforced in the American system. True, it’s a partisan political process—inevitably so, since neither party is particularly interested in airing its own soiled laundry. Republicans depreciated the January 6 investigation for just that reason, and Democrats will do the same when the failures and malfeasance of the Biden Administration come up for examination next year.

Because we’re heading into a period of divided government, oversight will be the Republican congressional majority’s most productive activity. The GOP can hardly be expected to “deal with inflation” in a positive manner when there’s a president of the opposite party in the White House, prepared to veto any bill that reaches his desk. And in the Senate, for all their condemnations of the filibuster Democrats will use it to kill Republican legislation. Investigations aside, the GOP majority can only serve as the spirit that always denies, preventing our profligate president from heaping even more fuel on the fires of inflation or doing various other stupid things. And that role, limited though it may be, is all to the good.

Democrats have had a fine old time, kicking Trump and his minions around on the floor. Now Biden and his merry band are about to receive the same treatment. That’s how the game is played, ladies and gentlemen: Politics ain’t beanbag—and neither is democratic accountability.