The Obama administration was not corrupt in managing the stimulus; it was Congress’s mistake to fund it so freely.
That's the message Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is offering a few days before he becomes chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sounding a measured tone that is miles from the persona he projected when the chamber was under Democratic control.
During his two years in the minority, Issa was the strong-handed Republican who grabbed headlines despite having little power. He forced subpoenas, talked tough about the Obama administration and became one of the more prominent Republican lawmakers outside his party’s leadership.
Now, during his final two days before the oversight gavel is his, Issa is trying to show that the committee under his control will not conduct a perpetual witch hunt against the Obama administration. It will be a rush to cut back on government spending via doing away with waste, Issa signaled on three separate Sunday shows this week.
Issa said he would not investigate the White House's alleged job offer to outgoing Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) to nudge him out of his state's Senate primary — it turns out, he said, such offers are common even if they are wrong.
But he did give clues to who is on his radar, including Attorney General Eric Holder. On “Fox News Sunday,” Issa said Holder is to blame for lax oversight of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, election intimidation by the New Black Panther Party and WikiLeaks. He said Holder “isn’t doing enough.”
“So he's hurting this administration,” Issa said. “If you're hurting the administration, either stop hurting the administration or leave.”
The oversight committee currently has a broad mandate to review government activities but little sway over legislation. Issa said the Republican House would work on a whistleblower bill that incorporates situations like the recent leak of State Department cables – and such a bill would likely come through his committee.
“And we're going to do that right off the bat because the kind of transparency we need is not to have somebody outing what is said by diplomats in private,” Issa said in reference to the WikiLeaks revelations. “And we need to change that, and that's going to be a big part of our committee's oversight, is to get that right so the diplomats can do their job with confidence and people can talk to our government with confidence.”
Part of Issa's pre-112th Congress scene-setting includes walking back some of the more inflammatory comments he made in the past year. Instead of the Obama administration being corrupt in dealing with the stimulus – what Issa said in several ways in the past – the Californian is saying that it was partially Congress’s fault.
“It's more about Congress's mistake in funding,” Issa said.
When asked directly by host Harry Smith on CBS's "Face the Nation" whether the Obama administration is corrupt, Issa simply replied that the White House has played “fast and loose with the walking around money Congress gave them” – redistributing some of the blame to Capitol Hill.
And Issa gave some staffing suggestions to his friends in the Obama administration: It’s not lawyers you’ll need, it’s accountants to find waste in government programs.
“The president's Office of Management and Budget views $125 billion of misspending by Medicare, and yet, year after year, it doesn't change,” Issa said. “That's 10 percent of the deficit that would go away if we simply stop paying to people who don't exist their claims."
"It's more about the inspector generals than it is about lawyers in the White House," Issa added. "And the sooner the administration figures out that the enemy is the bureaucracy and the wasteful spending, not the other party, the better off we'll be.”
Source: Politico
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