This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 11th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress's focus on the attack on the Capitol earlier this year is valuable.

Our members foregoing the kind of oversight that should be occurring continuously,

especially as we mark 20 years of the Liberty-crushing Patriot Act and other sweeping government

authorities.

Cato's Pat Edington comments.

I can remember, perhaps vaguely, and Pat maybe you remember this better than I do, a time

when lawmakers would get elected and then would set out to do the basic, boring, unpleasant,

necessary work of providing congressional oversight over federal agencies, over the various activities

of the government, failures of the government, and perhaps I'm blinded by lawmakers who would appear to appear to be

social media stars and would rather own the other side on Twitter than do that sort of basic governance work. Am I wrong

about that? Is there a reduced interest in sort of the basic oversight, the

critical oversight functions that Congress provides?

I don't think there's any question that the crop of legislators, both parties, both chambers that we have at the federal level, are not cut from the same cloth as folks, let's say, from the Watergate era.

You know, there's this famous story about the late

senator Edmund Musky whereby he had this habit at oversight hearings among

other things of sticking around as his colleagues would basically

kind of get bored with things and he would simply collect their proxies, and that is how he would

be able to win an awful lot of votes when they had markups and things of that

nature because he was willing to kind of stick with it.

And the late senator, Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts, I would argue one of the last truly serious legislators that we've had.

...