Yesterday Darrell Issa ended a hearing rather than put up with Democrats
getting to say things; as it turns out he may have had a good personal reason for doing so, as the Democratic complaint revolved around whether Darrell Issa gave Fox News access to a heavily biased (again) Republican "report" (again) on IRS actions that
committee Democrats themselves were not permitted to see. In other words, the topic of discussion was to be whether Issa was a con man peddling false stories (again), and when you're Chairman of the con in question you don't have to put up with such nonsense.
Today House Democrats offered a motion on the floor condemning Issa for his actions.
“The House of Representatives strongly condemns the offensive and disrespectful manner in which Chairman Darrell E. Issa conducted the hearing,” according to the text of the resolution.
But since the motion wasn’t offered by the minority leader, Republicans used a parliamentary objection to set it aside.
Of course it was.
I confess to being impressed that Issa has been able to keep his committee post this long. Yes, a chairman resigning from the post is a very uncommon thing, but nobody can seriously argue that the Issa-led committee has been anything less than a fiasco throughout his tenure. Time after time his staff gets caught leaking information, peddling false information, going back to long-previously debunked topics—it's a clown show. Can anyone even name a topic on which the committee has not humiliated itself?
Ah well. I suppose our misunderstanding is expecting Issa to do the actual task of oversight; clearly, he and House leadership see the committee's role as being a prolonged publicity stunt. By that metric, he's doing a bang-up job. Again.