WASHINGTON — Just another Tuesday afternoon and the far-flung offices of the WBI -- the Waxman Bureau of Investigation, a.k.a. the self-appointed Inspector General of the World -- are buzzing.
Hunched over a table in the Rayburn House Office Building, close enough to the kitchen to smell the reheated spaghetti, an investigator hunts for signs of corporate misconduct. Two floors down, in a basement cubbyhole, a former MIT scientist is busy discovering that some seniors can do better at Costco than through the new Medicare prescription plan. Up the block, at another outpost, a researcher has spread out Dick Cheney's personal finances to see how the latest GOP tax cuts will benefit administration bluebloods. Nearby, staff lawyers look at clean-air regulations, AIDS funding and whether a Wilshire Boulevard renovation project will make traffic worse.
Meanwhile, back in the main office, legislative aides are finishing up a bill to end global warming. World peace may have to wait until Wednesday.
By most measures, Democratic Rep. Henry A. Waxman, 66, of Los Angeles ought to be one of the most irrelevant elected officials in Washington. He's been in Washington since 1974, but his party is in the minority. He is an unapologetic liberal in a Capitol dominated by uncompromising conservatives. And his public utterances are so unfailingly partisan that he has little capacity to get cooperation from his Republican colleagues. He also contributes to the toxic political climate that many decry in present-day Washington.
Yet at a time when many of his Democratic colleagues have spent the last decade in a defensive crouch, outmaneuvered by their GOP rivals, Waxman has found another way to have an impact -- going outside normal legislative channels to exert influence on issues he cares about. In the process, he has also made himself into what many Republicans consider the biggest pest east of the Mississippi.
The key to Waxman's unlikely success is this: He has assumed a big chunk of the watchdog role usually filled by the entire Congress, probing deep into government programs and problems to oversee a president and GOP he believes have run amok.
As ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee -- the chief oversight body of the House -- Waxman has leveraged every scrap of his party's resources. He has poked and prodded the Bush administration on Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction, on faulty prewar intelligence and on Halliburton's questionable contracts.
