Just because congressional investigations may have been misused, however, doesn't mean that they can't be done well and that they are not a vital function of Congress.

History is filled with congressional investigations that were vital to the health of our democracy. Senate hearings into the Teapot Dome scandal in 1923 exposed corruption that had taken place under President Warren Harding. The Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 became a platform through which opponents of the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy finally started to bring him down by revealing to the public the dangers of his methods. And, in 1966, Sen. William Fulbright conducted hearings that offered middle-class Americans a first look into the massive problems with the US military operations during the Vietnam War.

Beginning in 1973, the Watergate hearings, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, became a vital forum through which the public discovered the high level of corruption and abuse of power that had taken place in President Richard Nixon's White House. The House Judiciary Committee hearings into Watergate that followed were also an important moment when bipartisan agreement started to emerge over the need for the President to go.

In the mid-1970s, Rep. Otis Pike of New York and Sen. Frank Church of Idaho each led investigations into the CIA's activity during the Cold War. These set important precedents and led to institutional reforms by the end of the decade.

The House and Senate Committees that looked into the Iran-Contra affair in 1987 unpacked the tangled web of policymakers, arms dealers and high-level advisers who were illegally sending money to the Nicaraguan Contras -- despite a congressional ban on doing so. And in 1994, Rep. Henry Waxman of California lit into tobacco industry executives for lying to the public about the addictive nature of their product.

Many voters took a stand earlier in November and registered their strong disapproval -- via midterm elections -- for the President of the United States. Now the nation turns its lonely eyes to a divided government, in hopes it will reassert control on a presidency run amok. While it was not a unanimous vote, with the Senate and House now under two different parties, one thing is clear: The vote was a strong democratic cry to check-and-balance Donald Trump.