From Military.com comes word that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), Ranking Member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee has threatened to block funding for the headquarters operations of the Department of Veterans Affairs unless the Department provides the Committee with "the raw metrics the VA uses to create the monthly reports [on VA's efforts to clear its backlog of claims] the lawmakers currently are getting." Per Military.com's report, "The monthly reports the VA provides to the committee are not sufficient to determine what is happening, [Burr] said."
The solution? The Committee should do its own analysis. "'[T]he committee needs the performance metrics that you don't get on a monthly report in order to do oversight correctly,' [Burr asserted]." This is a Republican Senator, mind you. An uphold-the-Constitution sort of fellow. A respect-for-the-Founders's-intentions kind of guy.
Arguing against separation of powers.
Dear me. What should the interested observer think? Sen. Burr is proposing that the Legislature, or a part of it (indeed, only a part of a part of it) should take over administrative management of part of the Executive. The Legislature running the Executive. It has, from time to time in the United States's history, come to pass that the Legislature effectively runs the government, and the Executive has merely been the instrument of effecting the legislative will. The administrations of John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison serve as cases in point.
Conversely, it has happened that the Legislature has been reduced, albeit willingly, to the means of enabling the executive will - FDR's First Hundred Days being the definitive example. Never, however, as far as I know, has the Legislature ever attempted so blatantly to take over an administrative function of an Executive Branch department.
Sen. Burr would do well to mind his constitutional principles. If he fails, or refuses to do so, his constituents need to hold him accountable for it in 2016.
The idea of the Legislature administering the Executive. Well, Duh!
