Knight Rid­der reports changes since Sen­a­tor Pat Roberts left the Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee:

Sens. Jay Rock­e­feller and Christo­pher “Kit” Bond have joined forces to put the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee back on track after a rocky few years by run­ning it in bipar­ti­san fashion.

The com­mit­tee is hold­ing more fre­quent and more robust hear­ings, engag­ing in aggres­sive over­sight of intel­li­gence agen­cies and issu­ing joint find­ings. Mem­bers are help­ing — rather than hin­der­ing — those of the oth­er par­ty in the craft­ing of legislation.

This is pos­si­ble part­ly because Rock­e­feller and Bond agreed to merge their com­mit­tee staffs, elim­i­nat­ing duplica­tive or even com­pet­i­tive work, sav­ing resources, and allow­ing bet­ter results.

The impact, experts say, could be bet­ter nation­al security. …

Sources on the com­mit­tee attribute the pre­vi­ous wran­gling part­ly to efforts by Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney to push issues he was inter­est­ed in through then-Chair­man Sen. Pat Roberts, R‑Kan., lead­ing aggres­sive com­mit­tee Democ­rats such as Sen. Carl Levin of Michi­gan to push back.

With the Demo­c­ra­t­ic takeover of the Sen­ate, Rock­e­feller has moved to chair­man and Bond vault­ed over sev­er­al Repub­li­cans to become vice chair­man, Roberts left the com­mit­tee and Levin moved over to become chair­man of the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Committee.

“When­ev­er a com­mit­tee flips (in par­ty con­trol) it’s got anoth­er dynam­ic any­way, but in this instance the dif­fer­ence between Rock­e­feller and Roberts is night and day,” said a senior Repub­li­can aide famil­iar with the com­mit­tee’s work­ings, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. “Rock­e­feller is real­ly an ami­able guy, has no prob­lem entic­ing Repub­li­cans to par­tic­i­pate in the process, where­as Roberts tried to move along a Repub­li­can agenda.”

What’s odd is that for many years, Roberts was reput­ed to be the go-to guy for work­ing across par­ty lines. Who knows what hap­pened when he took charge of the Intel­li­gence com­mit­tee, but around the same time, he did start shak­ing around bot­tles of “mem­o­ry pills” on nation­al TV. 

He blamed the inef­fec­tive­ness of his com­mit­tee on Democ­rats, but it turns out that Kit Bond, no mod­er­ate among Repub­li­cans, has no prob­lem with new Demo­c­ra­t­ic chair­man Rock­e­feller. Per­haps now the com­mit­tee can under­take over­sight into ille­gal war­rant­less wire­taps, the abuse of intel­li­gence to sell the Iraq war, and the state of affairs with Iran. All of those func­tions of the com­mit­tee had been stalled under Roberts’ “lead­er­ship.”