Today, committees have lost much of their autonomy to party leaders. As a result, investigations are often used in periods of divided government as a partisan tool to club the administration and its supporters. More often than not, committee investigations become arenas for majority party “message politics” — contests designed to score political points rather than to identify problems or to generate solutions that can garner bipartisan support. The higher the partisanship in Congress, the lower its committees seem to fall.
May 9, 2013, Sarah A. Binder,
New York Times