Principles
Underlying the legislature's ability to oversee the executive are democratic principles as well as practical purposes. John Stuart Mill, the British Utilitarian philosopher, insisted that oversight was the key feature of a meaningful representative body: “The proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.” As a young scholar and future President, Woodrow Wilson equated oversight with lawmaking, which was usually seen as the supreme function of a legislature. He wrote, “Quite as important as legislation is vigilant oversight of administration.”
The philosophical underpinning for oversight is the Constitution’s system of checks and balances among the legislature, executive, and judiciary. James Madison, known as the “Father of the Constitution,” described the system in Federalist No. 51 as establishing “subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner that each may be a check on the other.”
Read more about this topic: Congressional Oversight
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)
“To abandon oneself to principles is really to die—and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)