When it comes to wielding Congress's formidable investigatory power, it is hard to think of anyone in modern history who has done it as effectively as former representative Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
In the mid-1990s, he took on Big Tobacco with high-profile hearings, remembered for the moment when industry executives swore under oath that their product was not addictive. His exposure of that blatant lie helped pave the way for a landmark $246 billion legal settlement.
Waxman's other headline-grabbing probes included those digging into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports, the 2008 collapse of Wall Street, the waste and fraud in government spending in Iraq and the flawed intelligence that got this country into that war in the first place.