Quote (Black XistenZ @ Nov 26 2020 01:08am)
Congress (House or Senate) investigating something like that just doesnt work. In practice, it violates separation of powers since the president will almost always be the de facto leader of his party and almost always hold soft power over "his" senators and congresspeople. (He can threaten to prop up a primary challenger, or threaten to withdraw access to the WH from dissenters and weaken their power/influence over policy this way, etc.)
Conversely, if the opposition party controls Congress, such an investigation will predictably devolve into a partisan circus which is more concerned with landing blows on the president than uncovering the truth.
Congress will always be compromised by partisan interests and personal career considerations of all sorts. You're never gonna get a clean, neutral investigation out of it. In theory, a neutral, objective agency like the FBI is the right place for an investigation like this. The true crux in the Trump/Comey/Mueller/impeachment saga was the fact that the FBI itself had become compromised by partisanship, that its leadership was clearly working against the elected president.
More generally speaking, it is a huge problem that the federal bureaucracy is increasingly aligned with one of the two parties instead of being nonpartisan. And as the Trump years have shown, they are increasingly willing to flex their muscles to undermine a lawfully elected president who wants to steer policy in a direction they dont like. Many career bureaucrats were flouting the will of the American people, as expressed by the result of the presidential election. This is a really concerning precedent. Strange that all of you who were constantly worried about Trump eroding democratic norms and institutions never talked about this kind of norm erosion and undemocratic behavior.
so the president, who is the head of the DOJ which contains the FBI is less of a compromising position than party loyalties? Jeff Sessions recused himself lol.
if we're talking how this one worked out, ok, but generally? lol.