Baker-Hamilton 2.0

A permanent bipartisan committee of senior statesmen is needed to check presidential power.

from the July 16, 2007 edition

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The federal courts are held in higher esteem than Congress. But in the national security domain, they exert themselves only at the margins, mostly when constitutional issues arise.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Inspector General's office (IG) do good work, but their job is limited to ferreting out fraud, waste, and misconduct, rather than making judgment calls about whether a given policy course is the "right" one. It would be unthinkable for the GAO or an IG to challenge a president's insistence that a war was being won rather than lost.

In sum, the absence of comprehensive oversight by a body independent of the White House makes for a glaring deficiency in presidential accountability on the gravest of issues.

Who, then, can fill this accountability gap? We believe that part of the answer is to impanel a standing, bipartisan committee of senior statesmen and women – along the lines of Baker–Hamilton – whose mandate would be simply to "speak truth" from time to time as they see it on critically important national security issues.

Their primary contribution would be to act as a centrifugal force against administration spin. The committee would not make national security policy. That, we agree, is something an elected president cannot and should not try to outsource. But its experience, expertise, objectivity, and credibility would combine – at least on issues where a consensus could be achieved among ideologically diverse members – to serve as a brake on administrations that put ideology before reality.

Future presidents would rightly feel free to reject the policy prescriptions of such a group, no matter how eminent or "grise" its members. But a president would also be far less free to insist that black is white or up is down if a group such as the one we have in mind were unanimously to declare otherwise.

Baker-Hamilton 2.0 is a good first step. Even better would be an evergreen version. Modest though it may be, this proposal – if implemented – would be a major step in the right direction of presidential accountability where the stakes are life and death.

• Clark Kent Ervin, the first inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, is the director of the Homeland Security Program at the Aspen Institute. Andy Zelleke is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and codirector of its Center for Public Leadership.

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