I’ll probably never say this again, but I think I’m actually on Darrell Issa’s side here. He decided to do things a little differently at today’s TARP hearing:
At the start of the hearing, chairman Rep. Darrell Issa announced the committee members would waive their opening statements and instead would have seven days to place them into the record. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, immediately fought back questioning this deviation in traditional procedure, but Issa held his ground. “I recognize that tradition is we hold the members, the witnesses here for sometimes an hour through opening statements. That is a tradition that I intend to break,” Issa said. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be opening statements in the future.”
….Rep. Dennis Kucinich later interrupted and stated, “I’ve been in the Congress for 14 years, and I’ve never — it’s just unprecedented that the ranking member not be permitted to give an opening statement.”
I don’t know all the details here. I assume that Issa himself didn’t give an opening statement either, and I assume that in the future the rules for statements will be fair to both sides. If not, then Issa’s being a dick. But let’s face it: long rounds of opening statements are a scourge. They virtually never produce anything of note, and forcing witnesses and everyone else to sit through them is a waste of time. Overall, I expect Issa to run the oversight committee like the partisan attack dog he is, but on this particular issue I salute him.
