In the past week, Hillary has brought a new line of attack against Obama: that he has not used his chairmanship of the European Affairs subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to conduct oversight on Afghanistan.
This charge is very misleading, and deliberately betrays an understanding of how Senate committees work, in several respects.
Here's what she said at the debate last week:
"It [the subcommittee] has jurisdiction over NATO. NATO is critical to our mission in Afghanistan," she said then. "He's held not one substantive hearing to do oversight, to figure out what we can do to actually have a stronger presence with NATO in Afghanistan."
And here's the text from her recent ad on this topic:
"Barack Obama says he has the judgment to be president, but as chairman of an oversight committee charged with the force of fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, he was too busy running for president to hold even one hearing."
It is true that Obama has not held a hearing of the subcommitee on European Affairs since becoming subcommittee chairman in early 2007. But there are a number of very relevant factors that mitigate against the charge that Hillary is making in her statements.
1. The European Affairs subcommittee does not have jurisdiction over Afghanistan. That responsiblity belongs to the the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs, chaired by Sen. Kerry. You can see the jurisdiction of each subcommittee at this link.
2. All Foreign Relations subcommittee hearings are at the discretion of the full committee chairman. This is clearly stated in the Committee's rules:
...no subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations shall hold hearings involving expenses without prior approval of the chairman of the full committee or by decision of the full committee.
Stated plainly, Biden approves all subcommittee hearings. And as full committee chair, he can reserve any issue for himself, and for consideration at the full committee level. That's what he did in 2007 (when, importantly, he was also running for President) on many high-priority issues, including Afghanistan; see for example, this hearing:
http://www.senate.gov/...
Given the realities of power on the committee, it's not likely that Obama would've been allowed to hold a hearing on Afghanistan in 2007. And Biden has reserved other European topics (e.g. US-Russian relations) for the full committee within the past year.
3. Subcommittee chairs are basically figureheads on the Senate Foreign Relations committee. The full committee chair (Biden) runs the show. He gets to hire all of the Democratic staff and controls the agenda of the committee. Again, from the Committee rules:
The staff works for the committee as a whole, under the general supervision of the chairman of the committee, and the immediate direction of the staff director, except that such part of the staff as is designated minority staff, shall be under the general supervision of the ranking member and under the immediate direction of the minority staff director.
Obama has no committee staff. He and other members of the Committee below the rank of Chairman must therefore rely heavily on personal office staff to support their work for the Committee. They can't direct committee staff in the same way that the Chairman can. He has not had an office full of committee staff sitting around doing nothing for the last year.
4. Yes, he's been running for President. So has Hillary and McCain. They have all been absent to some degree from their duties as Senators since the beginning of 2007 - running for President is more than a full-time job in itself, and it's inevitable that they've lagged in performing their duties as Senators. On this score, McCain has actually been absent the most, missing 56.6% of roll call votes in the 110th Congress. And as others have noted in the past few days, Hillary has missed plenty of important Armed Services Committee hearings over the past few months.
Bottom line: yes, it would've been a good idea for Obama to have a hearing or two in 2007, perhaps on a topic like US-EU relations or the situation in the Balkans. But his failure to do so is hardly the dereliction of duty that Hillary is making it out to be, especially when one looks more closely at his actual authorities and resources as a subcommittee chair.