Congressional oversight of the executive branch is as extinct as the dodo bird or brontosaurus. Too bad there’s not an endangered species list to protect wayward politicians and help them reassert themselves.

According to a study by The Boston Globe, congressional oversight activities have been sharply curtailed by the current Congress. Instead of keeping tabs on the executive branch, oversight hearings, the few there have been, have concentrated on advocating policies favored by conservatives.

During the Clinton administration, the Globe found, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours hearing testimony on whether the president inappropriately used the White House Christmas card list for fundraising. In the past two years, the House has taken only 12 hours of testimony on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

You might expect that partisanship would account for the difference. But the Globe went back to 1993-94, the last time Democrats were calling the shots in the House and there was a Democratic president, and found that investigations then greatly exceeded those by this Congress. The Democrats’ Government Operations Committee held 135 hearings investigating Clinton, while the Government Reform Committee, the Republican counterpart to Government Operations, has held just 37 investigating Bush.

Given that the administration is under investigation by a special prosecutor, that the chief of staff for the vice president has been forced from his job, the absence of a congressional inquiry is striking.

When Republicans took over Congress in 1994, they took aim squarely at Clinton. More than 1,000 subpoenas were issued by the Government Reform Committee alone, the Globe reported. Even before Clinton was impeached, executive staffers spent more than 55,000 hours responding to congressional inquiries.

During the Clinton years, Congress often acted like an underfed junkyard dog, convinced of its own righteousness and the inequities of the Democratic interloper in the White House. They aggressively kicked over every stone, and sometimes went too far. Other times, the work was justified.

Now, with a Republican administration that has used illegal propaganda, is accused of replacing science with politics at the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency, and has justified and defended torture, congressional oversight has failed.

We don’t expect Republicans to be as vigorous as they were during the Clinton years. But Congress has a duty to act as part of the checks and balances along with the executive and judicial branches. Otherwise, we don’t have three equal branches of government fulfilling their charge to counter the others. We have a monolith concerned only with consolidating power, not good governance.