The Overseer
by digby
The new congressional overseer was all over the TV this morning, with a message for the President:
Issa, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, suggested the administration needs to move faster. [on Wikileaks]
The California Republican said Sunday that if President Obama is not treating the unauthorized disclosure as terrorism, then Holder needs to go after the leak as a criminal matter. “Otherwise the world is laughing at this paper tiger we’ve become,” he said.
Now that’s funny. If anyone is laughing at America it’s because it elects clowns like Issa to positions of great power:
Issa also criticized Holder for not doing more to investigate ACORN’s use of federal funding and punish members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped outside a Philadelphia polling station in 2008, one wielding a nightstick.
The latter case drew the attention of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which voted last month to approve a report criticizing the Justice Department for its handling of the matter. A voter intimidation case was dropped in 2009 against all but one of the defendants. The Justice Department has denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were dropped because the facts in the case did not support intimidation claims.
George Will later excitedly reported on This Week that Issa was going to hold 560 hearings:
This is because Republicans believe that such is the contempt for the electorate after the election that just passed as demonstrated in the lame duck session, that the Obama administration will try and do everything it can by regulation rather than legislation. You mentioned the Net Neutrality, the taking of more public lands into new classification by the Interior Department the EPA proceeding with carbon limits. All of these are challenging congress on the question of “who rules?”
Now that’s really funny. Everyone told me that the lame duck session was a model of bipartisan compromise and here I find out that Republicans view it as a result of contempt for the electorate and are going to do everything they can to impede the president on anything he tries to do going forward. Who could have predicted?
For some reason Will’s words reminded me of this from 2006:
by digby
I’ve been digesting this morning’s hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans’ abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles (“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse”) now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush’s political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.
I’ve watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.
We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminineces Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.
They were very clear about “who rules” back then — and it wasn’t them.
FYI: Will also said that the message of the election most definitely wasn’t bipartisanship. It was to stop Obama. I’m fairly sure that’s what most Republicans think. The president thinks it was “work together to get things done.” The only way that works out is if Obama agrees to pass the GOP agenda. On the other hand, even that won’t be good enough for the Republicans, will it?
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