As the controversy over the National Security Agency's phone and Internet data gathering reminds us, one of Congress's most challenging assignments is oversight of the nation's intelligence community.
Keeping tabs on that the part of the federal government which constantly invokes national security to justify its opaqueness has its obvious difficulties and frustrations regardless of which party controls the House or Senate.
Those frustrations came through in a conversation I had with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for six years. She's the top Democrat on the Intelligence oversight subcommittee.
How challenging is it for lawmakers to do oversight of the intelligence community given all the secrecy? I asked.
SCHAKOWSKY: "There's a number of challenges for all of us on the Intelligence Committee because all of us, maybe with the exception of the chairman and ranking member who may spend most of their time dealing with the issues of the Intelligence Committee, most of the rest of us are definitely part-timers. We work on other committees.
So the responsibility of oversight of 16 intelligence agencies, including the huge ones of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, it's a tremendous responsibility. And yet the cards are stacked against us in many ways, in terms of doing a really good job, particularly for the rank and file.
"Often it's just the chairman and ranking member on both the House and the Senate intelligence committees that are fully read into all the classified information and the covert operations. So we're not always fully up to date and fully briefed on everything."