Over at the Washington Independent I’ve been watching as Rush Holt, the progressive congressman from New Jersey who sits on two different intelligence oversight panels, conspicuously namedrops the epochal Church committee. In the 1970s, Frank Church in the Senate and Otis Pike in the House led two investigations into the entire history of CIA operations, and what resulted was the legal and congressional architecture that governed the agency until, well, Bush came to power. (In a move too painful to be ironic, what spurred the initial investigations was a, uh, New York Times report about widespread warrantless domestic surveillance.)

Anyway, so I caught up with Holt and asked him if he’s serious about this or what. Here’s my latest, in today’s Washington Independent:

“I’d like to see something on the scope of the Church committee,” Holt told TWI in a Friday phone interview. The congressman said that it had been a  “few decades” since Congress took a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence community’s impact on “the relationship between the individual and her or his government, as well as the role that the U.S. plays in other countries around the world, outside of declared military activities.”

Holt said he did not have a concrete proposal prepared for the creation of such an investigation, and was at the stage of seeing what colleagues and members of the intelligence community made of such a move. “There’s agreement with the idea,” he said. “An awful lot of people have not really thought about how many unanswered there are or unresolved issues there are out there about how we do intelligence in the United States.”

He declined to name any members of congress with whom he has discussed such an investigation, but said they were members of the House intelligence committee and the oversight panel he chairs. “Are we close to commissioning a study in the way I’m conceiving it? No, not yet,” he said. A House Republican aide, who requested anonymity, was unaware of Holt’s early feelers, raising questions about whether Holt’s envisioned inquiry would have Republican support. And a spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), the House intelligence committee chairman, did not return a request for comment.

 No one from the intelligence community would speak to me for the story. Holt told me that some, in their more candid moments, respect the idea of a Church-like investigation. But… I dunno about that. My experience has been that the only thing the community fears more than a New Church is another 9/11.