The House of Waxman

When the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, headline writers had a field day with the bestowal of subpoena power on Henry Waxman, the dogged hound of oversight from California.

“Scariest guy in Washington,” said Time magazine’s cover story.

“The Waxman Cometh,” trumpeted the New Republic.

Those articles hang in the waiting area of Mr. Waxman’s office, alongside pictures of the congressman with each of the past five presidents and various other dignitaries.

His placid, even gentle demeanor may not show it, but the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform obviously relishes his pit-bull reputation, which he established as a subcommittee chairman focused on health and the environment from 1979 to 1994.

Since taking over as chairman of one of the most powerful investigative committees on Capitol Hill, the diminutive Democrat from Los Angeles has been the very constant thorn in the Bush administration’s side that everyone expected.

Mr. Waxman, 68, said in a recent interview that he simply has restored a sense of fairness to the same oversight committee that Democrats howled about when Republicans used it to issue more than 1,000 subpoenas against the Clinton White House in the 1990s.

“When I became chairman, I was determined to put oversight in a more appropriate and nonpartisan way,” he said, seated in his Rayburn Building office.

His esteemed opponents in the Republican Party beg to differ.

The White House did not want to comment publicly about its dissatisfaction with Mr. Waxman’s multiple points of attack.

However, the White House press office has a list at the ready for journalists, chronicling all the investigations initiated so far by Democrats in Congress. The list bristles with indignation.

Dems have started more than 650 investigations since early 2007, making at least 1,200 requests for documents, interviews or testimony and holding more than 1,300 oversight hearings, the list says.

The Bush administration has produced more than 1.8 million pages of documents at a manpower cost of more than 168,000 hours, and 1,100 executive-branch officials have testified before Congress, the list also says.

Only House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, comes close to matching Mr. Waxman’s responsibility for these massive numbers.

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