This is just a quick selection of articles about a topic that's currently dear to my heart: Congressional oversight.  Unfortunately, a lot of shit is going to come to light, but unless there's a sexy-money scandal to get people lathered up over it, nothing will really change for the next couple of years.  

FT.com / World / US & Canada – Bush ‘distorted’ climate change reports

The Bush administration has routinely suppressed or ­distorted communication of climate change science to the public, a climate specialist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute said on Tuesday. The accusation, before the chief oversight committee in the House of Representatives, was reinforced by claims by Democratic lawmakers that the White House was withholding documents proving that Philip Cooney, a former Bush administration official who now works as a lobbyist for ExxonMobil, regularly edited climate reports for political reasons. “We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimising the potential dangers,” said Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the oversight committee.

House panel probing Bush's record on signing statements

WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said yesterday that he is launching an aggressive investigation into whether the Bush administration has violated any of the laws it claimed a right to ignore in presidential "signing statements."

Bush has claimed that his executive powers allow him to bypass more than 1,100 laws enacted since he took office. But administration officials insist that Bush's signing statements merely question the laws' constitutionality, and do not necessarily mean that the president also authorized his subordinates to violate them.

Conyers said the president has no power " to ignore duly enacted laws he has negotiated with Congress and signed." And he vowed to find out whether the administration has followed each law it challenged — including laws touching on classified national security matters, such as the tactics used to interrogate suspected terrorists and the FBI's use of the Patriot Act.

 

 Russ Feingold: How to End the War

Our founders wisely kept the power to fund a war separate from the power to conduct a war. In their brilliant design of our system of government, Congress got the power of the purse, and the president got the power of the sword. As James Madison wrote, “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.”

Earlier this week, I chaired a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee to remind my colleagues in the Senate that, through the power of the purse, we have the constitutional power to end a war. At the hearing, a wide range of constitutional scholars agreed that Congress can use its power to end a military engagement. 

 Bush's war powers further scrutinized

But Congress may again tackle the debate over habeas, which could have implications for the case of Mr al-Marri and the several hundred detainees still imprisoned at Guantánamo.

Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, last week said they would work to reinstate the right of habeas corpus for all detainees.

“The great writ of habeas corpus was done horrible damage by the Congress in a law the president signed last year,” Sen Leahy told Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney-general last week.

“I just want to put everybody on notice: as chairman of this committee, I will do everything possible to restore all the rights under the write of habeas corpus that were there before we passed the [MCA] legislation,” he said.

That's not all, but at least it's a beginning.