- FEBRUARY 4, 2011
The subpoena king’s hilarious advice.
- In the glass-houses department, Henry Waxman is accusing Republicans of “an abuse of the oversight process” and “going on fishing expeditions” as they investigate the White House. This is like Ben Roethlisberger volunteering to chaperone spring break.
The 19-term Beverly Hills Democrat made his name as a hell-for-leather investigator of business and, at least during GOP Presidencies, the executive branch, so there’s more than a little humor in his sternly worded letter to Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton yesterday. Mr. Waxman believes Republicans have gone too far by requesting documents from Health and Human Services as they probe ObamaCare’s implementation.
Days after the 2006 election, Mr. Waxman mused to reporters that the Oversight Committee he would chair had “jurisdiction over everything” and said that “the most difficult thing will be to pick and choose.” He didn’t. Which Waxman investigation was most frivolous is still an open question. Was it his dogged pursuit of the Karl Rove conspiracy to “out” Valerie Plame, or Dick Cheney’s phantom plan to enrich Halliburton, or the White House noninterference in climate science?
By the summer of 2008, the Bush Administration had produced more than 1.8 million pages of documents and more than 1,100 different officials had testified before Congress to comply with some 650 investigations. Mr. Waxman wasn’t responsible for all of them, though we’d note that the Oversight Chairman is the only one who can issue subpoenas unilaterally, without a committee vote.
Now Mr. Waxman claims Mr. Upton is “unduly disruptive” because he is asking for basic HHS communications about an office set up under ObamaCare to write and enforce regulations on private insurance companies. Originally, that office directly reported to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, but it was suddenly relocated to the Medicare center after Republicans took Congress.
The bureaucratic reshuffling was likely meant to counter GOP attempts to defund the office, which has nothing to do with Medicare. Mr. Upton is also asking for information about the process by which HHS has granted more than 700 waivers to its union allies and others exempting them from certain ObamaCare mandates.
Mr. Waxman couldn’t help but note that “I am a strong supporter of congressional oversight”—you don’t say—but still urges Mr. Upton “to take a more measured approach in the future.” We can think of 1.8 million reasons Mr. Upton should listen to someone else.
