When Darrell Issa took over the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, everyone expected a tsunami of scandal investigations. But it hasn’t really happened. Why? Jonathan Bernstein says it might be because Obama 
just runs a really clean shop, but he doesn’t find that convincing. Or maybe Issa is just incompetent. But that’s not very convincing either. That leaves this:
Totally, totally, speculative, but here goes. Perhaps the reason that the House isn’t manufacturing scandals is because the changed media environment has changed the incentives. In the old days, opposite-party Congresses had to work hard to manufacture scandals good enough to get the neutral press to notice. Now, why bother? Most partisans, and especially the primary voters that Members of Congress are increasingly most worried about, get most of their news from the partisan press, and they don’t need any Congressional stamp of authority to consider something a legitimate scandal worthy of devoting hours of programming to.
Maybe! But there’s another possible explanation: maybe Dave Weigel was right all along. It’s true that Issa promised lots and lots of investigations (“I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks”), but there was also this:
“As Clint Eastwood says, a man needs to know his limitations,” Issa said….While he promises an ambitious — and some say confrontational — agenda, Issa is making overtures to the Obama administration: He already has a meeting scheduled with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss stimulus oversight.
….Issa is also pointedly looking to avoid probing what he seems to view as peripheral issues — like Waxman and former Chairman Tom Davis’s foray into hearings on steroids in baseball. “This is important, in contrast to hearings on steroids in baseball, where I felt that it was inherently wrong to get Roger Clemens to lie to Congress,” Issa said. “The American people really want us to shrink government.”
Issa also wants to avoid the sometimes petty controversies that enmeshed Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) as committee chairman during the Clinton presidency and sometimes made him the issue.
It pains me to say anything nice about Issa, the man who bequeathed us Arnold Schwarzenegger, but maybe he takes this stuff more seriously than his critics ever gave him credit for. Obviously he’s going to focus his attention on conservative causes and he’s going to focus his oversight on the Obama administration — both perfectly reasonable things to do — but perhaps he was sincere about avoiding petty nonsense. Stranger things have happened.
