Issa-is-the-GOP-man-with-a-plan-for-genuine-congressional-oversight

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He may be the most effective Republican ever to serve on the little heralded panel that nevertheless has the power to change profoundly the course of government.

Issa has been thinking seriously about how congressional oversight should work and how it would function if voters return Republicans to majority status in the House in November. He issued a 16-page report this week that describes in detail just how lax the panel has been since 2008 in fulfilling its oversight duties.

Issa's approach is not strictly partisan in the traditional sense. He notes that oversight tends to be much more active and effective when one party controls Congress and the other the White House.

For the latter half of the dozen years the GOP previously held majority power in Congress (1994-2006), oversight of the executive branch was mostly an afterthought. Things improved during the short two years when Republican Bush was president and Democrats controlled Congress.

But then President Obama was elected in 2008 and Democrats controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and they became much less interested in seeing the panel with a high profile. Issa explains why the current economic crisis has made such apathy about oversight an especially unaffordable pose:

"The unparalleled encroachment of the federal government in the private sector and the lives of individual Americans that began during the Bush Administration and continues in the Obama Administration (see, for example, the Troubled Assets Protection Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the rapid growth of the federal workforce, and the health care and financial overhauls) has led to concerns of an oncoming tsunami of opacity, waste, fraud, and abuse," Issa said in his report.

"This trend must be met by vigorous Congressional oversight of the massive federal bureaucracy," he said, in a masterful piece of understatement.

Issa describes in clearly respectful, even admiring, terms how previous committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, approached oversight as ranking minority member prior to 2006 and in the final two years of the Bush era, but things got seriously off track after Obama took office.

Waxman left the panel and was replaced by Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-NY:

"Unfortunately, since President Obama took office 19 months ago, the country has seen the emergence of a large accountability gap," Issa said.

"Congress’ chief watchdog committee has failed repeatedly to conduct meaningful and sustained investigations and hold federal executives and bureaucrats responsible for the unprecedented levels of waste, fraud, and abuse that such rapid growth has nurtured," he said.

"Despite repeated requests by the Republican Minority for oversight hearings, joint investigations, and subpoenas, and despite myriad news reports raising allegations of waste, fraud, and other misconduct, the Oversight Committee and the Democratic-controlled Congress have overwhelmingly shunned responsible but tough oversight of the Obama administration."

Issa cites the dramatic difference in oversight energy displayed by the panel under Waxman during the final two years of the Bush administration and the first two years of the Obama administration under Towns. Waxman issued 455 official requests for information from government agencies or private citizens, compared to only 173 such requests under Towns.

The contrast is just as stark when the comparison is on committee hearings:

"With the 111th Congress scheduled to adjourn on October 8, the Oversight Committee in 2010 is set to have held significantly fewer hearings than the Committee held in the last year of the previous Congress," according to Issa.

"In 2008, the Committee, under Democratic leadership with a Republican in the White House, held 96 full committee and subcommittee hearings. Thus far this year, under Democratic leadership with a Democrat in the White House, the Committee has held or is scheduled to hold only 76 full and subcommittee hearings, a decrease of 21 percent," he said.

"Similarly, in the 110th Congress, the Oversight Committee held 74 full committee hearings; thus far in the 111th Congress, there have been only 62 full committee hearings, a decrease of 16 percent."

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the panel under Towns' chairmanship is found in Issa's noting that only 13 Obama administration officials were invited to testify in 34 hearings focused on national security and foreign affairs issues, and that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not appear at all before the committee despite its multiple hearings on economic recovery decisions in which he played a leading role.

For more on these issues, including detailed lists of issues on which GOP requests for hearings were ignored, go here.

And for an excellent analysis of how Issa's role is viewed by Democrats and by key members of the watchdog community, see this article in a recent edition of The Hill.



Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Rep-Darrell-Issa-is-the-GOP-man-with-a-plan-for-genuine-congressional-oversight-103609024.html#ixzz10LvOxVfa