No truth, no consequences: if Congress wants to discourage testifiers from lying, maybe it should ask them to tell the truth.

• Author: Hickox, Katie

Before politicians take office, they are sworn in. Before witnesses testify in court, they pledge honesty. New citizens must swear their allegiance to the flag. High school students filling out college applications must attest to their truthfulness. Some states won't even let you drive unless you first take an oath. There is no limit, it often seems, to the venues in which Americans lean on the oath to steer their consciences to honesty--with one glaring exception: the hearing rooms of the United States Congress, where only a handful of the thousands of witnesses interviewed each year are required to take an oath before testifying.

Pick up your morning paper and you'll see why this is more than an itsy-bitsy problem. Congressional inquiries of bureaucrats, agency heads, and others are the linchpin of investigations from unraveling Iran-contra to unearthing the health risks of breast implants to exposing the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. In terms of public interest, the need for honesty in these inquiries is about as enormous as it gets. Unfortunately, in terms of private interest, the incentive to lie in those hearings can be equally gargantuan. Imagine the klieg lights glaring in your face as, say, the hard-nosed Henry B. Gonzales leans forward and starts to grill you. Imagine being asked to answer questions that will implicate your boss, your friends, or worse, your own leadership and integrity. Now imagine knowing that if you fudge the truth, forget the facts, or even tell a whopper of a lie, not much will happen to you if you're caught. You are imagining the current state of affairs on Capitol Hill.

Of course, it's thanks to the effectiveness of certain congressional hearings that the public now knows about some of the costliest and most ethically disturbing government and private-sector scandals of the decade. But the absence of the oath has made getting to the bottom of those scandals far more strenuous than it should have been, and far more expensive to taxpayers. Today, you're supporting a vast bureaucracy of congressional staffers whose job it is to pick through the responses of a parade of witnesses, culling the truth from the white lies and the black ones. Why should the burden rest with them? Asking congressional testifiers to swear to tell the truth requires no new staff, takes virtually no time, and doesn't cost a dime. And while it obviously won't render the lie obsolete in the Rayburn building, it might help reverse an incentive system that has made lying to Congress one of Washington's more enduring traditions.

Of course, lying to Congress, oath or no oath, is still a punishable offense, one that can carry a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison. But lawyers agree that a perjury case can only be proven in court if the witness had been sworn in: Having stated the oath for the record, witnesses accused of lying cannot later claim they were...