Rep. Darrell Issa’s ties to big business run deep, and as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, Issa has functioned quite efficiently as an arm of a Wall Street lobbying shop. He has demanded that government regulators back off from applying new rules to Goldman Sachs, and he has fought tooth-and-nail to deny the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and its yet-unconfirmed director Rich Cordray, any significant means to protect the public from fraud and abuse by the financial industry.
It’s (unfortunately) expected that members of Congress will take pains to protect their favored constituencies, but Issa has taken the overlap of money and politics to a new extreme. Issa’s deep ties to Wall Street are not a figment of his distant past – to this day he is so deeply beholden to Wall Street’s interest that it is difficult at times to discern which hat he is wearing – his investment tycoon hat or his chairman-of-one-of-the-most-powerful-committees-in-Congress-responsible-for-holding-corporations-and-the-government-accountable hat.
For example:
- While Issa fought to block the SEC investigation of Goldman Sachs, he quietly bought $600,000 worth of Goldman Sachs bonds.
- While Issa was accusing the Treasury of a “cover-up” in their role in Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch, he didn’t mention that he had completed transactions with Merrill Lynch totaling $1 billion over the last decade.
- Many of Issa’s staffers epitomize the K-Street ‘revolving door.’
But the most troubling symptom of Issa's rapid swapping of hats is that the American people suffer when the Oversight committee fails to do its job outcomes of investigations are pre-determined. When the committee -- at Issa’s direction -- investigated the FCIC for finding the “wrong” causes of the financial crisis, Issa simply cancelled the hearing when the investigation turned up examples of wrongdoing by Republicans. In other words, anything that, in the words of Issa's spokesman, “doesn’t fit the narrative,” was thrown out and what could have been an important investigation was postponed indefinitely.
As more and more examples of Issa’s eagerness to put corporations before people and Wall Street before Main Street rise to the surface, the American people will surely demand that those charged with making sure everyone plays by rules do so themselves.