As Schwarzenegger Exits, Rep. Darrell Issa, the Cry-Baby Pol He Shoved Aside to Become Governor, Sets Sights on Impeaching the President

Speaker-Elect John Boehner may be the Republican most associated with sobbing on camera right now, but in California, the pol most famous for a girlie-man crying jag is Rep. Darrell Issa of San Diego County.

Issa is also remembered in California as the Republican pol who funded the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, only to find himself shoved aside in the race to replace Davis by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger complete his term as governor today.

In 2003, Issa, an accused car thief turned wealthy car-alarm entrepreneur, donated $1.7 million to a cabal of fringe GOP operatives intent on bringing down Davis in order to damage the California Democratic Party. In August of that year, with recall petitions certified, lawsuits settled and the recall officially underway, Issa, then virtually a political unknown, made an indelible first impression on California voters when he broke down in tears at a news conference with national and local news cameras rolling.

Issa’s motivation in funding the recall of the governor had been simple. He wanted the job for himself. But at the news conference, where by all rights he should have been announcing he was in the governor’s race, he was forced to announce he was dropping out instead.

With his universal name recognition and ties to the state’s more moderate Republican establishment, all that Schwarzenegger had to do to claim the top GOP slot in the race was announce that he was running. From Issa’s perspective, Schwarzenegger had swooped in and bigfooted him out after Issa had done the heavy lifting. It was enough to make a grown man cry.

The recall of Gov. Davis in 2003 was, in many respects, a precursor to the tea party phenomenon that would sweep through national politics six years later. With the recall, Republican operatives with corporatist leanings, including many who would play key roles in the Sacramento-based race-baiting astroturf operation, Tea Party Express, seized a moment of public unrest over the state’s $30 billion budget deficit and, by obfuscating the real reasons for it, were able to pin the blame for the fiscal mess solely on Gov. Davis.

In fact, the deficit was the result of factors that were almost all beyond the governor’s control, including Republican mismanagement of the state during the 16 years the party controlled Sacramento prior to Davis’ first term as well as an accumulation of misguided ballot initiatives that restricted the Legislature from lowering spending and raising taxes and Enron’s ripoff of California energy consumers for $30 billion, an amount eerily similar to the deficit itself.

But the truth will out, especially when it comes to Big Lies. Just a few months into the Schwarzenegger administration, it became clear that the entire premise of the recall was bogus, that the state’s economic crisis was systemic, that Schwarzenegger was too inexperienced and temperamentally unsuited to govern.

With the swearing in of Gov. Jerry Brown today, Schwarzenegger exits Sacramento even more reviled than Davis ever was — his job approval rating was just 26 percent in a recent poll. In his column on California politics in the Times last week, George Skelton lamented the damage done to California as a result of Issa’s — and Schwarzenegger’s — hubristic folly:

One thing should now be evident as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger packs up his office: It was a mistake to recall Gray Davis.

Davis didn’t deserve it. He had just been reelected the year before. He would have been out of office in three years anyway.

Schwarzenegger wasn’t an improvement except for, briefly, providing entertainment. He didn’t make the state’s money mess any better. In fact, it has gotten worse.

It was not a citizen uprising that dumped Davis, a Democrat. The 2003 recall election was called because one ambitious Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of Vista, spent $1.7 million of his own money to collect the needed signatures.

Issa wanted to run for governor himself. But he gave it up when Schwarzenegger leaped into the race…

In the intervening years since he took down the governor of California, Issa has maneuvered himself into position to take another crack at taking down a big target. This time, he has sights set on the president of the United States.

When Republicans assume control of the House on Wednesday, Issa will chair the Oversight Committee, the committee where efforts to impeach the president usually begin. In the 1990s, it was Republican Oversight Chairman Dan Burton’s unrelenting, almost entirely trivial investigations of the Clintons, which even included an investigation of their cat, Socks, that led to the impeachment of Pres. Clinton because he’d told a sex lie during a deposition in the discovery phase of civil lawsuit unrelated to his time as president.

Over the past few years, Issa has become the darling of journo-groupies who cover Congress, much as Sen. John McCain once was. Like McCain, Issa is more voluble than most Republicans, perhaps because, like McCain, he is a more practiced, perhaps even sociopathic, liar. He has convinced these sycophantic scribes that he is much too reasonable a fellow to go off half-cocked and impeach the president over whatever trumped up rationale he can muster.

Issa’s critics in California look at his record, which is rife with self-aggrandizing political opportunism and colossal bad judgment, and believe it is more likely than not that he will file articles of impeachment late this year or early in 2012.

In an interview with right-leaning Politico.com after the midterms last year, Issa announced that the committee he chairs and its seven subcommittees will hold “one or two hearings each week.” Topics will include the bank bailout (which, it should be noted, happened on Bush’s watch), the stimulus and the health-care reform law.

“I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks,” Issa told Politico. For anyone old enough to remember the Clinton wars in Congress in the 1990s, that certainly sounds like a return to the Chairman Burton era — 280 hearings in search of a bogus infraction that can be trumped up into a high crime or misdemeanor.

If Speaker Boehner wanted someone to lead impeachment efforts, he could have found no better guy to do it than Issa, who, after all, is already “blooded.” If Boehner wanted impeachment to be “off the table” — as incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi did in 2006 regarding the Bush-Cheney administration’s torture regime, its betrayal of a CIA covert operation tracking WMD and its taking the country to war based on lies — then he has made a colossal error of judgment in giving the Oversight chair to Darrell Issa.

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