Rep. Darrell Issa is one of the most polarizing members of Congress. As chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the California Republican has pursued several high-profile investigations of the Obama administration, including its handling of the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. Issa’s aggressive, often combative nature has infuriated the White House and Democrats and even ruffled feathers within his own party. But Republican term limits require him to relinquish his chairmanship of the committee in early January after a four-year period that raised the national profile of the panel as well as himself. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, will be succeeding Issa, who will be chairman of the House Judiciary intellectual property subcommittee in the 114th Congress.
A deft businessman and successful inventor who has been named the richest member of Congress, Issa spoke with the Washington Examiner about his approach to running the committee, his relationship with House Speaker John Boehner and his love of technology. The following is a lightly edited version of the conversation.
Examiner: You were a highly successful entrepreneur before coming to Congress, making a fortune in the car alarm business. Why would you give that up for the craziness and uncertainly of a life in Congress?
Issa: There’s an advantage to not needing the job, and that is, you can do it pretty boldly when you can afford to lose it. If you look at the history of Teddy Roosevelt and other people who — whether with their own money or money that they earned — they had the luxury of coming in boldly and trying to do the right thing in whatever amount of time they’re there. It’s actually a gift, in a way, to be able to come to Congress and not worry about whether you get re-elected — just worry about what you do in the time you’re here.
Examiner: So, you don’t worry out getting re-elected?
Issa: No. I haven’t bought a yard sign since my first race. Really. I make it a point to run on my record. No campaign expenditures in the district.
Examiner: What do you say to your critics who accuse you of focusing the oversight committee too much on the Obama administration at the expense of other areas of the federal government?
Isaa: First of all, we’ve only done government oversight. Some of my predecessors wanted to do private-sector oversight. We made our focus on government waste, fraud and abuse. I always tell people, we didn’t do “President Obama’s administration,” but every part of the federal government is his administration. So whether it was the [Government Accountability Office] report on the administration or [inspector general] reports or whistleblower reports — they all dealt with waste, fraud or abuse with some agency. And there’s about 72 agencies that the government’s broken up into.
Examiner: Some critics also have accused you of running the committee in more of a political way than the panel has historically been run. Do you agree?
Issa: Under former [House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman, a Democrat], the committee came to prominence because he pointed out fairly egregious failures in the [George W.] Bush administration. One of them I always remind people of is the flying of $20 bills to Iraq and not accounting for those dollars as they flowed into the Iraqi economy. Chairman Waxman’s [tenure] was similar to the way I came into it. He came from a time in which he’d been the ranking member and the other party, the party of the president, had been controlling things. And many said there wasn’t enough oversight [of the administration], and Chairman Waxman said that repeatedly. … The big difference here is I came in two years into President Obama’s administration, where Henry Waxman came in during the last two years of the Bush administration.
Examiner: Do you think Democrats unfairly obstructed your investigative efforts, and if so, was it worse than during past oversight chairmanships?
Issa: [Former Republican] Ranking Member Tom Davis was much better at supporting the legitimacy of the oversight done by Henry Waxman of the Bush administration. Having said that, Mr. [Elijah] Cummings [the committee’s top Democrat], having lived up to his campaign pledge when he took his predecessor, Ed Towns, out, he did so by going to the [House Democratic] Steering Committee and specifically to former Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, and making the case that he would stop me at every step. And he has attempted to.
Examiner: You’ve certainly had some public squabbles with Ranking Member Cummings. How would you describe your working relationship with him overall these past four years, as well as the other Democrats on the panel?
Issa: It was actually quite good. We passed whistleblower reform on a bipartisan basis, federal IT reform is sitting in the Senate and hopefully will soon be law, the DATA [Digital Accountability and Transparency] act — all of these were passed broadly bipartisan. [But] we couldn’t pass legislation on a bipartisan basis for things like [issues regarding] federal employees of the Postal Service. The Democrats are stridently trying to hold onto jobs that cause the post office to lose billions of dollars every year, because they’re union jobs that pay union dues.
Examiner: How much independence did your Republican leaders give you in deciding what to investigate, what not to investigate, and how vigorously to investigate what you did pursue?
Issa: It’s always a struggle. The pledge you take when you take this job is to broadly go across the entire government. … When you go across the entire government, you go across every other chairman and the inherent belief by chairmen that they should investigate even when they didn’t investigate — even when they could and are not investigating — [and that] often creates a problem. Certainly with Benghazi you saw that, where the Armed Services Committee and Select Intelligence Committee basically whitewashed Benghazi. And we continued to dig and find whistleblowers and to bring more to light … But the same is true with IRS, where most of the authority belongs to Ways and Means, and yet we took the lead in pushing hard, not just against Lois Lerner but against this whole cover-up of the clear targeting of conservative groups — something that Mr. Cummings to this day is saying didn’t happen.
Examiner: So, no apologies, no regrets, for the way you’ve run the committee?
Issa: There are things you would do better if you could do them over again. I wouldn’t abandon aggressively going after waste, fraud and abuse in government. I wouldn’t do less if I had to do it over again. I might streamline things to be able to do more.
Examiner: Was there anything you missed, any investigations that you wanted to pursue but just ran out of time?
Issa: We’re working on them right now. There’s one called Tiversa, which basically is an organization, a company, that falsely alleged a lot of cyber intrusions and embellished what their capabilities were in false statements before Congress, false statements before the Federal Trade Commission. … Operation Choke Point [a Justice Department investigation into financial firms that handle payments for alleged scam artists] we haven’t really begun to push back on targeting of, if you will, entities that [the Obama] administration doesn’t want to see in business under Choke Point. The FDIC and others are trying to put entities out of business, including payday lenders but also including cigar shops and a host of other companies.
Examiner: Will you remain a member of the oversight committee?
Issa: No. Early on I announced that if there was any way not to have a chairman emeritus hanging ’round, that that would be better. I’ve served on a lot of committees where chairmen have nowhere to go when they’re done. … So I’ve asked the Steering Committee to give me Foreign Affairs and Judiciary … and I’ll focus on those two committees, and allow the new chairman not to have the shadow of his predecessor there.
Examiner: How would you describe your relationship with Speaker John Boehner?
Issa: I’m the bane of his existence. If I did much less, he’d get much less complaints from other chairmen that I was investigating things that they think are theirs. He’d get less complaints from former Speaker Pelosi. He definitely would have an easier life. But he also wouldn’t have had the deep investigations that showed where this administration [failed] … It’s kind of one of those things where you don’t like the messenger but you love using the message. And that’s OK. We fight hard to be allowed to do our job, and the speaker has generally supported me. But I do make his life difficult. An aggressive chairman makes it harder on leadership, but to the benefit of everyone.
Examiner: Did he ever ask you to ease up a little bit?
Issa: No. The speaker has asked me to work with other committees, and I have. He’s asked me to sort of work on a timeline that allows the other committees a little bit to do — that kind of coordination. He’s never asked me to abandon an investigation. He’s never shut me down.
Examiner: You hold more than three dozen patents. Do you have a favorite?
Issa: My favorite didn’t make me a nickel. Years ago I patented a security system inside a car battery. And it was ingenious because if the car battery wouldn’t deliver power you couldn’t start the car. … The only problem was you had to go into the car battery business to make it, and I patented the product but I didn’t have the capability of making batteries, and I couldn’t get a battery maker to make it.
Examiner: Any leadership positions that you’d be interested in?
Issa: I’m much more of a policy person. I’m a leader in the sense that I’ll support candidates. I’m a leader in the sense that I’m very passionate about pieces of legislation and how we do things. But I don’t know if I’ve ever fit the mold of sort of the “speaker in waiting.”
SEAN LENGELL can be reached at [email protected].
