From Congressional Quarterly:

Issa: A Republican Watchdog, Unleashed

By Bennett Roth, CQ Staff

It’s become a weekly tradition on Capitol Hill — the Darrell Issa memo on a White House outrage.

Last week, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent out a mass e-mail warning that the White House might try to sidestep contentious hearings for Kenneth Prewitt — its initial pick to head the Census Bureau — by appointing him instead to a senior Commerce Department post that doesn’t require confirmation but where he would potentially oversee census operations. The memo decried Prewitt’s support for using statistical sampling to compensate for missed minority populations when he was Bill Clinton’s Census director. And it quoted a letter that Issa helped draft to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke asserting that appointing Hewitt to a job with census jurisdiction "would be a blatant disregard of the entire Senate confirmation process and an affront to the Senate’s constitutional advice and consent prerogative."

Such harsh words are the traditional stock in trade of the minority party’s senior member of House Oversight — especially when the other party controls the White House. Since the committee is explicitly charged with watchdogging the operations of the executive branch — and has full subpoena power to do so — the post, which California’s Issa has had since January, is one of the only perches outside the House leadership that permits Republicans to take direct, institutionally supported aim at the Obama administration.

And House GOP leaders are already signaling that they expect Issa to stake out high-profile points of conflict with the White House. "He’s the kind of guy who will charge forward and get to where it leads him," a figure who will "push the envelope," said Kevin McCarthy of California, the chief deputy minority whip.

Outside analysts underline the same point: At a time when House leaders such as Minority Whip Eric Cantor are looking inward and assessing longer-term electoral vulnerabilities, more autonomous figures like Issa can be full-time partisans. "You wouldn’t put someone in there if all they wanted to do is talk consensus," said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. Tapping Issa for the oversight job "does say something about his party’s faith in his ability to throw a few hand grenades," he added.

That was certainly the approach taken by two of Issa’s best-known predecessors in the post: Indiana Republican Dan Burton mounted many early inquiries into alleged Clinton administration misdoings in the early 1990s — and stepped them up into high gear when he took over the committee’s gavel in 1997; and California Democrat Henry A. Waxman kept up a steady stream of high-profile investigations from 2001 to 2007, while he was ranking member and the Republicans held the White House, looking into everything from the career of disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff to Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret council on energy policy.

A Quick Start

It’s still early in Issa’s tenure to determine what signature issues he will pursue with the unique powers that come with the Oversight post. But he’s already made one strong statement by dismissing two-thirds of the 37 staffers on the committee assigned to the minority ranking member. The idea behind the firings, Issa explained, was to bring new blood to a committee where many senior staffers had worked mostly under a GOP House majority while Republican George W. Bush occupied the White House. "Primarily we needed to beef up the investigative and communications side," he said.

The last Republican with the top seat on the panel, the now-retired Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, had run the team "chiefly as a legislative staff," Issa said, since Davis was assuming he would "be back in the majority in two years." With Republicans in the minority for the foreseeable future, Issa argues, investigations have to be his chief order of business. "With half of the staff and half of the budget, you have to work smarter."

Over the coming weeks, Issa says he plans to have panel aides look deeper into the downfall of insurance giant AIG — a project that could in turn yield future attacks on lax Democratic oversight of the mammoth federal bailout programs. In addition, Issa says, the committee’s investigators will be working in concert with the Democratic majority to measure the impact of the economic stimulus — and to ensure Democrats perform due diligence in stemming wasteful spending as the $787 billion in funds are disbursed. There will also be some more workaday inquiries, he says, such as probes into how the Interior Department can increase federal revenue via the sale of public lands and a review of federal retirement policies and business practices in the postal service.

This more modest side of his agenda suggests that, even as a designated bomb-thrower for the beleaguered GOP, Issa is mindful that he can build some good will with panel Chairman Edolphus Towns of New York and other Democrats by stressing the government operations side of the committee’s mandate. "I am going to do what I can in this job to grow the value of what I bring to the conference," he said.

Nevertheless, he continues launching regular salvos at the White House, decrying everything from the administration’s failure to stop the bonuses AIG handed out to executives while getting money from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program to apparent bugs in the searchability functions of the White House Web site set up to promote transparency in economic stimulus outlays.

An Enforcer’s Evolution

In a sense, taking on a watchdog role in Congress is a natural extension of Issa’s private sector career: He made his fortune by taking over an electronic-parts firm and eventually marketing the Viper anti-theft car alarm in the 1980s. Indeed, the device’s trademark warning, "Please step away from the car," is a recording of Issa’s voice. (There’s also an ironic note in Issa’s car security success: He had a few run-ins with the law in his youth stemming from auto theft charges in Ohio and California.)

Issa first got into politics via an unsuccessful insurgent campaign for the GOP nomination to run against incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer for the Senate in 1998. But two years later, he was able to leverage his name recognition from that contest into a successful run for the open House seat in heavily Republican territory north of San Diego. He has since emerged as a major power player in state politics, thanks largely to the $2 million he spent to bankroll the 2003 recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, which led to the election of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Issa had initially put himself forward to state GOP leaders as the best possible successor to Davis, but they induced him to make way for the action-film star instead. Issa says he won’t rule out a future run at the governor’s mansion, but for 2010 he has already endorsed former eBay executive Meg Whitman for the Republican nomination.

Parsing Oversight Powers

Since arriving in Washington, Issa’s become known as an energetic critic of House Democrats. A favorite target is his home-state colleague, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In moving up to the ranking spot on the Oversight panel, Issa scarcely missed a beat in his rebukes to Pelosi, charging that she had deliberately short-shrifted funding for the Oversight panel now that the Democrats have regained the White House. He noted that the panel received the second-smallest budget increase of all committees in the 111th Congress — even as it retains a $22.3 million budget, putting it behind only the Energy and Commerce Committee, which pulls down $23.6 million. "I am concerned about whether the Speaker will allow the committee chair to do the job of holding accountable the administration through oversight," he said.

Democratic House leaders have largely refrained from firing back when Issa attacks, and other caucus members dismiss his complaints. Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern contends, for instance, that Issa’s mission is just "to tear something apart." Congressional Democrats won’t be able to blithely ignore the megaphone that Issa has on the Oversight panel, however.

The need for the ranking member to keep hammering away at the opposition is more than just an ideological mandate, observers say. It’s a question of keeping checks and balances in play between the parties and across the branches of government. "When you have the same party in the White House and Congress you tend to underinvestigate," said Davis, who was ranking minority member in 2007 and 2008, was chairman for four years before that and is now president of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership. Davis said that Issa "was taking his tips" from Waxman, who used his time as ranking minority member to devise ingenious tactics for using the committee to air issues unpopular with Republicans and uncomfortable for the Bush White House.

Issa agreed that Waxman did a "phenomenal job" of generating headlines during his time on the top of the minority party side. But he also criticized the Democrat for what he said was a habit of "holding hearings without a purpose" and characterized him as "a little hard to love."

Issa expresses greater warmth for Towns, calling him "a wonderful, nice guy." The difference in his relations with Towns and his predecessor, he said, is "night and day." (Issa also has a strong reason for staying cordial with Towns, since the chairman has to sign off on the minority’s subpoena requests.)

Waxman, for his part, downplayed any notion that Issa might be adopting some of the moves from his playbook as ranking member. "If he has a hard-charging style," Waxman said, "it’s his style, not my style."

Wherever Issa’s style comes from, veterans of Golden State politics underline one central point: It should not be underestimated. According to Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a Los Angeles Times columnist and political analyst at the University of Southern California, "I think you ignore him — as Gray Davis did — at your own peril."