Will Issa Miss?

Congressman Darrell Issa is the incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. As such, he will be in charge of most investigations over the next two years concerning problems of fraud, waste and corruption within the government. The prospect of those investigations is giving progressives agita of major proportions, so they are already trying to innoculate the Obama administration against these "partisan political" hearings. Witness the recent piece from Howard Kurtz in the Daily Beast in which Kurtz paints a picture of an overzealous political operative who sometimes talks nicely, but whose main goal is to embarrass the administration.

Ulitmately, none of the attempts to head Issa off or even to blunt his effectiveness will have any success unless congressman Issa himself allows himself to wonder into the nonsensical or hyper political. Suppose, for example, that Issa launches an investigation into how effective Obama has been in gathering up that half of a trillion dollars of fraud and waste in Medicare that is supposed to fund half of the costs of Obamacare. Could anyone object in good faith to the relevance or importance of that inquiry? The answer is clearly NO! Or suppose Issa looks into the waste or fraud in the Stimulus law. Again, could anyone object to that in good faith? The answer is again no, provided that Issa does not focus on nonsense.

For the last two years, there has been no congressional oversight of the administration, and Obama has used that fact to his advantage. Issa's committee is part of the checks and balances that are supposed to keep each branch of the government in line under our constitutional structure. Issa can abuse that power, but so long as he does not go off the deep end, he has an important role to play. Let's hope he does so wisely.