You’ve probably heard about the kerfuffle between the House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and the ranking minority member Elijah Cummings. It was quite a show with Issa breaching protocol by ending the session without Cummings getting to speak and then killing Cummings’ mic and walking out. It was such a blatant act of disrespect that it was hard not to be shocked. What’s more, given Issa is a Republican, it is hard not to assume that there isn’t some racial animus thrown in for good measure. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve embedding the incident below.
At first, Issa was unrepentant and acted as though he was the one harmed. This kind of conservative thin-skin cry baby behavior is getting tiring. Right after the incident, Issa said, “He was actually slandering me at the moment that the mics did go off by claiming that this had not been a real investigation.” But this didn’t fly and it looked like everyone was against him. The best he could get was Fox News just ignoring it. There were no segments with Hannity celebrating how Issa had struck a blow for the straight white conservative non-IRS employed man.
On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Issa had personally appologized to Cummings for the incident. Issa said, “As chairman, I should have been much more sensitive to the mood of what was going on, and I take responsibility.” So the whole thing is over. Right? Well, not really. What happened is typical of how Republicans manage to avoid a lot of bad press. By acting so horribly, most of the press managed to miss the deeper meaning of that House hearing.
Joan Walsh explained the situation last week. IRS supervisor Lois Lerner was slated to testify for the committee. At this point, it is well established that there is no IRS scandal. But early on, Lerner took the Fifth to avoid becoming a scapegoat in all of this. That’s not at all a bad idea. After all, Steven T Miller was fired as head of the IRS, even though he wasn’t in the position during the supposed scandal. But Issa was in search of some more coverage on Fox News, so he brought back Lerner to provide some more video of her not answering questions.
But what Cummings was going to say was that Lerner’s attorney was willing to tell them what she would say if they granted her immunity. This is a standard legal practice, which Issa surely knows. But he didn’t want to find out what Lerner knows and what she did. Most likely this is because she will say the same thing that everyone else has said: there is no scandal. So that is what Issa wanted to stop from happening. He didn’t want to get all the way through his media circus and then have Cummings point out that it wasn’t necessary and that Issa wasn’t interested in actually getting the information.
Darrell Issa is a great embarrassment in the House. And that says a lot for a House led by John Boehner and filled with people like Louie Gohmert. Issa has used the Oversight Committee in as reckless and self-serving a manner as Joseph McCarthy. Unfortunately, Issa is in a very safe Congressional district. He won the 2012 general election by 16 percentage points. But hopefully he won’t be in power for much more time because I know of no one on the national level who so abuses his power.