Congressional Oversight, Post-Trump
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with Molly Reynolds’s work on Congress. She’s a Senior Fellow at Brookings and a Senior Editor at Lawfare—and she has a new report out at Brookings, with Naomi Maehr, on “How partisan and policy dynamics shape congressional oversight in the post-Trump era.” Molly and her team have collected an enormous amount of data over the years about how Congress conducts oversight, and the report is a thought-provoking overview of what the legislature got up to during the 117th Congress.
Today on the show, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic talked with Molly about her report and what patterns she’s found in oversight from the 116th Congress through today. For fans of the Jan. 6 Committee’s work, they also discussed that committee’s investigation and what it does and doesn’t tell us about congressional investigations going forward.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath when the White House and Chamber of Congress particularly |
| 0:38.8 | the House are controlled by different parties. You see much more oversight of that executive |
| 0:44.9 | branch by the House than you do when they're controlled by the same party. This is not, |
| 0:49.7 | you know, groundbreaking or counterintuitive, but one of the things that our work does |
| 0:54.5 | is just add, again, and also adding this work with letters, which is largely novel, adds |
| 1:00.4 | to that body of understanding. This notion that we do, again, not shocking, but partisan |
| 1:05.7 | dynamics really do play a role here. And while the House and the Senate certainly did |
| 1:11.0 | investigative work directed towards the executive branch in the 117th Congress, they were |
| 1:16.4 | doing less of, you know, the House was doing less of it than it was in the 116th Congress. |
| 1:21.9 | I'm Quinted Jurassic, a senior editor at LawFair, and this is the LawFair podcast, August 18th, |
| 1:29.4 | 2023. Listeners of this podcast are probably familiar with Molly Reynolds's work on Congress. |
| 1:36.7 | She's a senior fellow at Brookings and a senior editor at LawFair, and she has a new |
| 1:41.1 | report out with Brookings with Naomi Mayer on how partisan and policy dynamics shape congressional |
| 1:46.8 | oversight in the post-Trump era. Molly and her team have collected an enormous amount of data |
| 1:52.3 | over the years about how Congress conducts oversight, and the report is a thought-provoking overview |
| 1:57.9 | of what the legislature got up to during the 117th Congress. Today on the show, I talked with Molly |
| 2:04.5 | about her report and what patterns she's found in oversight from the 116th Congress through today. |
| 2:10.4 | For fans of the January 6th Committee's work, we also discussed that committee's investigation, |
| 2:15.7 | and what it does and doesn't tell us about congressional investigations going forward. |
... |
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