A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The biggest thing it tells us is that in June of 2002 no one on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was thinking in terms of a major disaster on the scale of Katrina.  FEMA had at the time functioned well for a long time responding to less serious emergencies.  Along with the rest of the DHS agencies it had been given an important if somewhat hazy new mission after 9/11, but although this was reflected in some of the questions directed at Brown it was not the predominant focus of the hearing.  FEMA may subsequently have emphasized responding to a terrorist attack and deemphasized preparing to respond to a natural disaster, but this was not forecast either in most Senators' questions or in Brown's answers.

Now, I share some of the views expressed by Juliette Kayyem about this kind of hearing, though I wouldn't put them quite the way she does.  In a former life I was occasionally called on to draft questions for precisely this type of hearing.  Normal practice then, as now, was to assume that an agency running well (as FEMA then was by most accounts) would continue to run well, and that a nominee with experience in the agency (which Brown had) was competent to be promoted.  The exceptions to either of these rules were generally items of specific parochial concern to one of the committee members (and, sometimes, of personal interest to Senate staff), rather than potential worst-case scenarios.

There is no getting around the fact that most Senators look on confirmation hearings as an opportunity to get press for themselves.  If a hearing has a low potential for this -- Brown's confirmation, coming when it did, fell into this category -- Senators have many other things they can be doing.  They often go through the motions if they show up at all, and in fairness there are many nominations concerning which doing anything more would be a waste of everyone's time.

Having said that, the structure of the modern Senate makes it much more likely that underpowered nominees will slip through unchallenged.  The typical Senator sits on four full committees, at least two of which also have multiple subcommittees.  Effective oversight requires a Senator to know a subject well enough to ask the right questions; this in turn requires him to spend enough time on important subjects to understand them well; and this, finally, demands that other calls on his time be limited by reducing the number of committee and subcommittees each Senator is allowed to serve on.  The corollary of this -- that to get better oversight you need oversight by fewer Senators -- is uncomfortable for many people, and especially for Senators who like to present themselves back home as experts on everything. 

To reduce the chance of inadequate nominees to important positions slipping through the confirmation process, though, this is what needs to happen.  Julliette Kayyem's reaction to Brown's 2002 hearing boils down to "well, this happened because Lieberman (then the committee's chairman) is a wuss and Brown wasn't asked serious questions and the whole thing was shameful" -- all of which may be true, and none of which can be prevented in the future by any structural reform of the Senate.  My point is for oversight to have a better chance of working than it did with FEMA here, the impediments to effective oversight have to be reduced.  One of the most formidable of these impediments is too many Senators sitting on too many committees.