On Tuesday, July 2, the Transition to Governing Project held a conference to discuss the ongoing tension between the legislative and executive branches. The White House and Congress have had several recent clashes over the extent of legislative and executive powers, including the General Accounting Office’s request for documents from Vice President Cheney’s energy taskforce, the question of whether Tom Ridge should testify before Congress, and the subpoenas of Enron-related documents recently issued by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. A panel with extensive experience in the legislative and executive branches helped to shed light on the recurring conflict between the need for private deliberation in the executive branch and Congress’s oversight function. Joining Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI were Michael Davidson, a former senate legal counsel, C. Boyden Gray, a partner at the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center, John Podesta of Georgetown University Law Center, and Robert Walker, the chairman and CEO of Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates.