AN OVERSIGHT BY THE SENATE

AN OVERSIGHT BY THE SENATE
Washington Post: Anyone expecting senators to robustly question Attorney General John Ashcroft at a Judiciary Committee hearing last week came away disappointed. With some senators serving up softball questions, others too afraid of appearing soft on terrorism to challenge him and virtually all suffering from the familiar senatorial fondness for their own voices, an important element was missing from Thursday's oversight hearing: oversight.
Mr. Ashcroft began the hearing with a demagogic attack on those who object to his policies. He held up an Al-Qaida manual that urges operatives to exploit American civil liberties; the point was that anyone expressing concern about civil liberties would be falling into the terrorist trap. The closest any senator got to calling Mr. Ashcroft on this indecent display was when Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., sought assurances that the attorney general couldn't possibly be referring to anyone on the Judiciary Committee in his impugning of critics' patriotism. Heavens, no, Mr. Ashcroft said. Well, that's okay, then, seemed to be the senatorial response.
Mr. Feingold is actually one of the few committee members who elicited any significant information from Mr. Ashcroft. Under his questioning, the attorney general conceded that -- contrary to an earlier statement -- there is no law barring him from releasing the names of most detainees or the basis on which those people are being held. But aside from this point and a few useful colloquies about military commissions, the hearing produced next to nothing new. Mr. Ashcroft was not probed with any seriousness about the extent of his legal authority to monitor certain attorney-client conversations.
Important questions: Nobody sought his vision about the limits of the current expansion of law-enforcement powers. Nobody engaged him on how far he means to lower the wall that has historically separated intelligence gathering from law enforcement and whether -- as some of his policies suggest -- he regards that wall as completely anachronistic as a consequence of global terrorism. Nobody sought to determine what, as that wall comes down, is to protect Americans from spying by their government. These are important questions, and it matters profoundly what the attorney general is thinking about them -- and what the Justice Department is doing.
The point is not to make Mr. Ashcroft look bad. It is, or it should be, to hold him accountable at a time when the department is undergoing serious changes. Some of these changes, when fully fleshed out, will prove useful and defensible; others may not. It is Congress' job to encourage the good and preclude the bad, both to protect liberty and to ensure that counterterrorism efforts are as effective as possible. Right now it isn't popular to challenge the administration on such matters. But in similar circumstances in the past, a few senators or representatives of integrity and courage -- sometimes Republicans, sometimes Democrats -- would step forward, shrug off the polls and perform their constitutional duty of asking hard questions. Is there no one to assume that mantle today?