Before this week, Capitol Hill was mostly quiet about President Barack Obama's overseas drone strike program. Sure, the hardcore civil libertarians in Congress, like Senator Ron Wyden or Representative Jerrold Nadler, persistently needled the administration for information, and the subject came up at the occasional committee hearing. But drone strikes had never been a big, public topic of discussion in the House and Senate—certainly not the way they are in, say, Pakistan or the United Nations, which last month opened an investigation into the legality of the United States' operations. Micah Zenko, author of a recent Council on Foreign Relations report on the United States' use of drones, called Congress' oversight "extremely poor" last week.

This week, however, the volume has turned way up on the Hill. And it's only going to get louder. That's what happens when the president nominates the mastermind of his drone program, his chief counterterrorism advisor John O. Brennan, to lead the CIA: It focuses attention on what he masterminded. On Thursday afternoon, when Brennan appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he'll be asked to talk about those drone strikes in a public hearing on his nomination.

The Obama administration, wanting to clear potential obstacles to Brennan's confirmation, handed Congress a big victory late Wednesday. The White House reversed itself and agreed to provide legal opinions to the two Congressional Intelligence Committees explaining its rationale for ordering the death of a U.S. citizen overseas suspected of terrorism. That ought to answer some questions for members of the Senate panel, but not all of them. And it still leaves a number of other committees—not to mention the American public—in the dark.

To critics of the administration's policies, such scrutiny is long overdue. Other checks on executive power are stymied when it comes to intelligence: Reporters encounter difficulty in obtaining classified information, and courts run into the "state secrets" privilege. Congress, however, under the National Security Act of 1947, is obligated to receive information on intelligence programs from the executive branch that others are not.

Congress has waded into the intelligence controversies of the recent past, from warrantless wiretapping to torture to Guantanamo Bay. Its relative silence on drone strikes before this week was surprising—though Congress is not as clueless to the administration's drone programs as you'd guess from the public record. What Congress does learn about the drone programs usually happens behind closed doors on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It is with these committees that you begin to understand Congress' complicated relationship with the White House's most controversial national security program.