Checks and balances are returning to Washington

The beauty of the checks and balances that the founders built into our constitutional form of government is once again being demonstrated in Washington.
Congressional Democratic candidates ran in November on a promise to launch long-overdue oversight hearings on the performance of the Bush administration if they won a majority. They are beginning to make good on that promise.
It should not have taken a change in party leadership to get to this point. Even a Republican Congress should have recognized that it had an obligation to act as a counterbalance to the White House.
Instead, while President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pursued a policy of restoring power that they believed to have been usurped from the president and his administration, Congress sat by, largely nodding in partisan consent.
First of three
No prominent Republican stood to point out that Congress was established in Article 1 of the Constitution, and if any of the three branches of government should be more equal than the others, it should be Congress. The legislature, not the administration, was given control of the pursestrings and the sole power to declare war.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has begun looking into the incompetence of the Coalition Provisional Authority that squandered billions while failing to bring order to postwar Iraq. Stories about tons of 100 bills being flown on transport planes to Iraq where billions of dollars went missing are getting the kind of attention they should have gotten when they broke years ago.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is looking into the politically motivated firing of seven U.S. attorneys in the South and West. The Justice Department denied that politics was involved, and that answer might have flown six months ago (assuming the question would have been asked). Today, the Senate is a bit more skeptical.
A House appropriations subcommittee is conducting hearings into waste at the Department of Homeland Security. The subcommittee appears much more curious than its predecessors about accusations that the department has been impeding investigations into fraud and waste.
Looking at the war
The Senate spent much of last week in partisan and parliamentary wrangling about whether it should assert oversight on the president's conduct of the war in Iraq. Eventually, the senators will reach a consensus, if for no other reason than senators know that the American people are uneasy -- to put it in the mild language that a senator might appreciate -- about the conduct of the war.
Meanwhile, look for the House to forge ahead this week with its own oversight initiatives regarding the war. The House, too, will continue looking into the burgeoning use of private contractors (more billions of dollars involved there) who are doing work in Iraq and along the U.S. border that used to be done by soldiers and government agents.
All this is a healthy sign that balance of power government is making a resurgence in Washington. Even some Republicans are joining the effort.
Other Republicans, though, are more interested in asking whether the new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who lives in California, should be flying in a larger airplane than her predecessor, Dennis Hastert, a Republican who lives in Illinois.
What's important is in the eye of the beholder.