How effective is Congress is holding the President to account?

Question can be reworded in others ways such as to what extent is Congress effective in checking the power of the executive?

Effectively	Not effectively
Power of Investigation. Congressional Committees through the power of investigation continue to effectively scrutinise the actions and legislation of the executive through congressional committees, e.g. CIA torture report was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Benghazi attacks in 2012 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (+House Select Committee on Benghazi), the IRS scandal, dubbed ‘Obama’s Watergate’ is being scrutinised by the House Oversight Committee as well as the House Ways and Means Committee and all Cabinet members are accountable to congressional committees.	However, Congressional oversight has not always been effective. With regards to national security programs (such as the NSA’s mass data collection program) Congress has been described as being the ‘lapdog to the executive branch’ (National Journal) and this has come as a consequence of two factors: (1) Congress doesn’t have the right expertise to investigate such areas and (2) polarisation is growing so its difficult to provide adequate oversight through tinted, extremely partisan views.
Others. The Senate plays a big role in scrutinizing presidential appointments to the judiciary, cabinet and other areas in the executive like federal bureaucracy. Also can impeach.	Impeachments are rare and never really successful, although Nixon did indeed resign he was not officially impeached.
Lawmakers. Although the President in his State of the Union Address sets out the legislative agenda, it is Congress as legislature who implements his proposed legislation and therefore the executive is heavily dependent on Congress for legislation to be passed. Even when a president comes to office with a healthy working majority in Congress he can still face difficulty, e.g. in 2009-2010 when Congress was dominated by the Democrats Obama still faced difficulty in implementing Obamacare and as a result, a significantly watered-down version passed. With Congress being more polarised in recent years there has been a lack of bipartisanship between legislature and executive, which is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted, and as a result Congress is effective in scrutinizing the executive.	However, even if Congress may not listen to him during his state of the union address the President still has various weapons in his arsenal that he can use to circumvent Congress. In his state of the union address Obama ordered Congress to pass legislation on cyber security, but they made little progress so Obama went with an executive order instead to get federal agencies to impose penalties on people who pose a threat to US cyber security. He also threatened to use presidential vetoes which he’s already used on the Keystone Pipeline and although a 2/3 majority is required to overridden the veto, nowadays in a time of growing polarisation Congress rarely musters enough votes to do so. Also, signing statements allows the executive to pretty much legislate from the Oval Office.
Power of the purse. Congress has the power of the purse granted by the Constitution and therefore has control over all money which the executive branch may need, such as for instance to fund executive orders. This was most recently seen when the Department of Homeland Security’s funding was coming to an end and Congress were refusing to pass a bill to fund the DHS, had the bill not been passed the DHS would have been de-funded and Obama’s executive order would have most likely failed. Although his executive order did not fail, this highlights how through the power of the purse Congress can limit the power and influence of executive orders.	However this only applies to certain executive orders which directly require federal funding to enact – in most cases executive orders remain a virtually uncheckable power which the President uses to circumvent Congress and Congress can do very little about it. In addition to Obama’s immigration executive order he has also signed off around 24 executive orders on gun control after failed attempts in Congress to enact gun control (Assault Weapon Ban, Manchin-Toomey bill).
War Powers Act & Case Act. Through these pieces of legislation Congress continues to check the powers that the executive can exercise in the area of foreign policy. The President earlier this year submitted a report to the Senate requesting further permission to use force against ISIS, this however was met with gridlock in Congress with some thinking it stretches the Presidents power too far and some saying it doesn’t go far enough. The Senate is also in charge of ratifying treaties by a 2/3 majority – e.g. START Treaty in 2010 – this ability of the Senate to ratify treaties has also become increasingly important in the wake of the resumed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme (Obama wants to strike a deal, believing Iran can become an ally).	However, today Congress’ ability to check the executive’s power in foreign policy remains very limited and rules set out by the War Powers Act have not always been followed as seen by the Libya attacks in 2011 whereby no Congressional approval was granted. Nor has Congress used its constitutional power to declare war since 1941 and thus, the executive have effectively exploited their as Commander In Chief to take this power away from Congress. Also, with regards to treaties the President tends to go for ‘executive agreements’ instead which have the same effect as treaties but Congress does not need to ratify. There has been a lot of talk recently about how Obama may bypass Congress over the Iran nuclear deal and seal it with an executive agreement instead, completely ignoring Congress.