Foreign Relations at Center Stage

Sens. Richard Lugar, the Foreign Relations Committee's ranking Republican, and Joseph Biden, its chairman, preside over a remarkably collegial panel. (By Chris Greenberg -- Bloomberg News)

The Foreign Relations Committee is not the most important committee in the Senate. It doesn't have the checkbook of Appropriations, the tax-code clout of Finance, the intrigue of intelligence.

But it is the busiest, the most popular and, frankly, the most interesting. Always lofty in its mission, it was a brainy backwater when all was quiet in the world. But of course, with chaos raging around the globe, obscurity is no longer an issue.

Now the panel is a main stage for the showdown between President Bush and Congress over Iraq, and it is jammed with media hounds that make the spotlight glow all the brighter. The chairman is Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), one of the panel's three Democratic presidential contenders. His Republican sidekick, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, is less voluble but just as energetic, and together the two preside over a remarkably collegial and constructive outpost.

Indeed, the committee's greatness is a running theme.

"I'm not surprised at all that Joe Biden is convening a hearing like this with a distinguished group of panelists to talk about the critical foreign policy issue of the day," intoned Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.), another 2008 hopeful and the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, at the inaugural Jan. 10 hearing.

"It's exactly what Dick Lugar had been doing before," Dodd continued. "It's great to see this kind of leadership move back and forth here, with people who are highly competent, know what they're talking about and providing great leadership to the country."

By most statistical measures, the committee has been the Senate's busiest for at least four years. It has confirmed more nominees and held more hearings -- a total of 482 during the 108th and 109th Congresses, under Lugar's tenure as chairman, at least 100 more than any other panel.

In the House, members usually belong to just one or two committees, but in the Senate, there are fewer lawmakers to go around, so senators belong to four or even five panels. In the previous two Congresses, Foreign Relations held far more meetings than the combined total convened by the Finance, health and education, environment and Budget committees, according to committee records. During the same four years, it confirmed 359 nominees, again the most in the Senate.

The pace is intensifying under Biden in the 110th Congress. Since January, the panel has held 21 full committee hearings, three subcommittee meetings, and three business meetings. It has called 48 witnesses, including notables such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who appeared twice); former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Madeleine K. Albright and James A. Baker III; and former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The committee was established in 1816 with the principal tasks of approving treaties and confirming diplomatic nominations. It approved the purchase of Alaska, for instance, and the creation of the United Nations.

Despite the workload, the line of wannabe members is out the door. When the Senate reorganized after the November elections, demand was so great that party leaders decided to expand the committee's membership to 21 senators from 18. Taking into account vacancies that had been created, the panel gained four new Democrats -- Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), James Webb (Va.) and Robert P. Casey, Jr. (Pa.) -- along with four new Republicans, Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), David Vitter (La.), Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Johnny Isakson (Ga.).

Three other notable members include Sens. Russell Feingold (Wis.), a leading antiwar Democrat; Chuck Hagel (Neb.), a leading antiwar Republican; and Barack Obama (Ill.), a junior member but a front-runner for the 2008 Democratic nomination.

But the politics more or less stop at the threshold to the committee's ornate meeting room on the first floor of the Capitol. At a Jan. 31 Iraq hearing featuring Kissinger, Obama was grilling him on how to entice Iraqi factions to change their behavior. Then the senator realized his turn was up.

"Well, let me just close. And I know I'm out of time," said Obama. "That's okay," Biden interjected. "You're making a very salient point."

The seriousness of purpose persists despite the fact that the committee has little authority to force Bush to change course on Iraq -- only Appropriations has any real muscle, through its control of the Pentagon's purse strings, which it is trying to use this week.

"Our goal in these hearings is to strike a different tone," Biden said at another recent Iraq hearing. "It's to start from the proposition that all of us are united in our devotion to this country and our desire to help see it through a difficult time."