[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 125 (Tuesday, September 8, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H9310-H9311]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     ESCALATION OF THE CZARS DEBATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. With the embarrassing demise of Mr. Jones, the czars 
debate has escalated even beyond where it was when we left for the July 
break. Depending on how you count, there are some 30 czars. It's been 
said, in many different places actually, that there are more czars in 
this administration than the Romanovs who ruled Russia for three 
centuries had czars. There's an energy czar, an urban czar, an infotech 
czar, a faith-based czar, a TARP czar, a stimulus accountability czar, 
a non-proliferation czar, a terrorism czar, a regulatory czar, a 
Guantanamo closure czar, a climate czar, a cyberspace czar, many more. 
They even had for a while a de facto car czar, Steve Ratner, who wasn't 
a czar but ultimately he became the car czar even though initially they 
said there wasn't going to be a car czar.
  Now, the challenge here is that this appears to be an extra-
constitutional approach. Now, the Constitution says government officers 
with significant authority, principal officers of the government, are 
to be appointed by the President subject to approval by the Senate.
  Now, this has been interpreted, with the expansion of government, 
even to go five layers down; that they're expected to have delineated 
duties, deputy secretaries, assistant deputy secretaries, directors of 
different offices, come up to congressional committees, come up to the 
Hill, if not actually to get approved by the Senate, but at least to be 
accountable for what they do. We have it in the Government Reform and 
Oversight Committee, we call in many of these different people who have 
all sorts of delineated duties.
  Now, a clear way to avoid the checks and balances of this system is 
to put them under the White House rather than having a delineated 
position. This gives them potentially a consulting position as though 
they were a policy person at the White House, even though they're 
moving through the bureaucracy. The motive behind this obviously is 
that many things are not just in one department. For example, almost 
any of these different categories; obviously faith-based czar, there 
are departments in each part of the administration. TARP crossed 
multiple things. Terrorism crosses many of the departments. So the 
question is, when you have a traditional line structure, what do you do 
when you have things kind of stove-piped, and how do you interrelate 
with this?

[[Page H9311]]

  Well, it's one thing to have advisers in the White House. Quite 
frankly, the Bush administration was pushing the edges of this in their 
faith-based office that went from an office inside the White House to 
then appointing a faith-based office in each department that then the 
faith-based policy person had some influence over, although it wasn't 
as direct.
  By calling somebody a czar presumably means they have the power of 
the President to go behind and use their staff authority as though they 
were line, which is exactly what the founding fathers were debating 
about. There's a great new book, Plain Honest Men--The Making of the 
American Constitution, by Richard Beeman, a professor at the University 
of Pennsylvania. It's the first update probably in about 30 years of 
actual minutes, letters and things during the constitutional debates. 
And one thing through that book you constantly see is they couldn't 
agree on what powers the President was supposed to have. They went back 
and forth. Alexander Hamilton got so mad because he wanted it to be a 
permanent position that went basically for life, like a Supreme Court 
Justice, and he stormed out of the convention for nearly 30 days, only 
came back to sign it. So clearly there was a debate, and Hamilton lost, 
for accountability and a checks and balances of the system. And the 
czar approach is avoiding those checks and balances.
  Now, my friend and colleague, Congressman Kingston has introduced a 
bill, the Czar Accountability and Reform Act, the CZAR Act, that has 
three simple points to it. The person has to have advice and consent of 
the Senate. He is to not be exempted from the competitive service by 
reason of confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or public-
advocating character, which is kind of the debates we've had on the 
task forces around health care. With the former President Clinton it 
came up in multiple debates in the last White House where they say that 
Congress can't get e-mail oversight, we can't call certain people up 
because it's a policy-making decision, advice to the President. This 
bill would say it doesn't apply to a czar.
  And also if they perform or delegate functions which but for the 
establishment of such task force, council, or similar office would be 
performed or delegated by an individual in a position to which the 
President appoints an individual by and with advice and consent of the 
Senate, which basically means a czar can't take authorities from people 
who would have been approved by the Senate.
  Now, we actually have a model for this. It's the Office of the 
National Drug Control Policy. The so-called drug czar was the first 
czar. But we actually have legislation that guides his budget, that 
even gives the duties and delineation of his duties and the deputy 
director's duties and other people underneath it. It says which things 
he has line authority for. As chairman of the committee that did the 
last five-year reauthorization of this, we had all sorts of how high-
intensity drug trafficking areas are supposed to be used; the national 
youth anti-drug media campaign; the counter drug technology assessment 
center. We had appropriations for his staff and how much he would have 
for his staff and how much for his appropriations. We had specifics on 
how he was going to relate to the Department of Interior, the 
Department of Agriculture, the Attorney General, homeland security, 
defense. We had guidelines of what reports come to Congress and of the 
different relevant committees. Because while Government Reform had 
primary jurisdiction over the drug czar, it also went to Judiciary, to 
Energy and Commerce and other committees, so there were different 
reporting strategies. In fact, czar was a slang term up until this 
administration.
  For example, in high intensity drug trafficking area it says, 
``Designation--The director, upon consultation with the Attorney 
General, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of Homeland Security, heads 
of the National Drug Control Program agencies and the Governor of each 
applicable State may designate any specified area of the United States 
as a high-intensity drug trafficking area.'' That's explicit. That's 
not somebody wandering around with undefined authority. He's got a 
specific budget and so on.
  Here's the great irony. We had one czar who was in the cabinet, 
approved with the advice and consent of the Senate with a specific 
budget. And our current director of the Office of National Drug 
Control, Gil Kerlokowski, is a good man and would have been clearly 
cleared. But this administration chose to take the one czar that was 
approved with advice and consent of the Senate and take him out of the 
Cabinet, and now he's not certified either. So now even the one czar 
who has descriptions, who was following the pattern under this 
administration, has been changed. And the danger here is we do not know 
how the interrelationships between the people cleared by the United 
States Senate are working with noncleared people. We run into 
background check problems like Mr. Jones. But we run into other huge 
questions, and that is so much power centered in one place that's not 
accountable to Congress, that it's not even clear how we do oversight 
of that function.
  I criticized the last administration when they did too much of this 
and we had some back and forth about why they wouldn't appear in front 
of the different committees, even on policy advisers. We need to have 
direct, aggressive oversight in this House and in the Senate to find 
out how this is working, how decisions are being made, who's commanding 
what, and are the people now running the agencies' hands tied. The 
people who we delineated their duties, who were cleared with advice and 
consent of the Senate, are their hands now tied by a bunch of people 
who haven't gone through this process, who haven't been vetted, who do 
not have clear line authority, but are using the staff power coming out 
of the President of the United States to usurp the constitutional power 
of those who are designated principal officers and commanded by the 
Constitution to report to the House and Senate.

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