The Overseer's Targets

Ryan Lizza has a pretty amazing profile of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in this week's New Yorker. I won't begin to try to sort out the colorful details of Issa's personal background (let's just say they involve stolen cars and veiled allegations of arson), but the conclusion that Lizza draws from grilling Issa about the incidents is that the lawmaker is sensitive about making investigations personal.

Issa, Lizza writes, "speaks more like an accountant than like a prosecutor. 'I'm looking for waste, fraud, and abuse in government,' he told me. 'Do I have abuse of the power of the president while the president's in power? Can I make the government be more responsive and more efficient? Those are my major charges.' "

That leads Issa to say that investigations into issues such as whether President Obama is actually an American citizen are off-limits. But that doesn't mean Issa won't be aggressive about his oversight work. Indeed, he couldn't have made it more clear in recent weeks that he intends to probe deeply into government operations. But instead of aiming at the White House, he likely will focus his work on a more abstract, impersonal target: the federal government writ large.

After all, Issa already has declared that the president, whether Democrat or Republican, isn't really to blame for government's ills, but rather is a "victim of the bureaucracy." And his spokesman characterized that same bureaucracy as the "enemy."

For the people who have devoted their careers to the challenge of managing that bureaucracy, the next few years could be a rough ride.