And now, having managed to tease out a loose string involving the Justice Department's botched Fast and Furious gun-tracking program, he's dragged the House leadership along in voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. All in a continuing search for Issa's personal white whale: evidence of White House corruption.
As a reporter, I'm no defender of Holder --most recently I wrote that he was "gaining a reputation for passivity in a number of investigations," including of Wall Street and the BP Oil spill. And Issa's Democratic predecessor, Henry Waxman, was as partisan as he is. But at least Waxman was somewhat effective, as was a Republican committee head, former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. (For example, with their probes into steroids in baseball; the Bush administration's ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and the Army's cover-up of Pat Tillman's death).
Not so Issa. As Davis wrote, "Beyond its investigation of Fast and Furious, his committee hasn't recorded any big hits despite firing -- or misfiring -- at almost anything that moves."
In the current probe, Issa and the other Republicans on his committee have told melodramatic tales suggesting that border agent Brian Terry may have been a victim of the guns that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost sight of when it created its misbegotten sting program intended to trace weapons to Mexican drug cartels. But in their singular effort to find evidence that the Obama White House tried to cover up Fast and Furious, as Dana Milbank pointed out in The Washington Post on Thursday, the documents they are demanding are "only those since February 2011 -- two months after Terry was killed and the program was shut down."
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All of this has engaged the passions of nearly every Republican in the House, helped along by their mouthpiece, Fox News, on which the ineffable Michele Malkin declared yesterday that the Obama administration "let [the guns] go because they had an underlying gun-control agenda." Rep Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat on the committee, expressing the views of most Democrats, called the Holder contempt vote a political witch hunt and added, "It's witch-hunting season, and it won't be over until November."
But Maloney had that only partly right. It won't be over in November. It's been going on for many Novembers. Strident House Republicans have been on one continual witch hunt since the 1994 takeover of the House.
We all remember the endless (and fruitless) Whitewater investigation and the Monicagate scandal that emerged from it, like the monster baby in the cult movie Eraserhead. But perhaps you have forgotten all the furor in the late '90s when, helped along by misleading reporting by The New York Times, Republicans on the Hill pursued an endlessly snowballing series of pseudo-scandals. They began with allegations that President Clinton had corruptly permitted Democratic donor Bernard Schwartz, then head of Loral, to sell satellites to China, and culminated in the investigation into supposedly stolen U.S. nuclear secrets by a Taiwanese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee.
