A New Congress: Have We Been Here Before?

John Boehner was elected as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives and the business of the government begins anew with the 112th Congress. Or does it? The leader of the House Oversight Committee, Representative Darrel Issa, Republican has started his tenure by sending out questionnaires to at least one-hundred and fifty businesses, requesting that they inform him just what regulations they want him to target in the new Congress.  Mr. Issa feels that big businesses are being held back in earning as much profit as they can because of stringent government regulations. So he wants to eliminate as many of those federal regulations as he can, as soon as he can.

Would this be why multiple banks including J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and others had the best two years in earnings ever recently?  Why in the third quarter of 2010 profits of 1.6 trillion dollars were reported by U. S. corporations?  There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here in one person’s opinion. Would not the banks and other businesses have a red bottom line instead of a black one if they were so restricted by federal regulations? Just posing the question.

But instead Mr. Issa and his team want the businesses to write their own rules and let’s start the process all over again of slipping into gosh knows what. One former CEO of Citi-group stated that “we seem to be listening to the same people who with their poor judgment got us into this mess.”  Well that appears to tell the story in a nutshell.

Mr. Issa  in his capacity as Chair of the Oversight Committee will also be proceeding with investigations into whatever strikes his fancy, as he in interviews on television shows has called the Obama administration the most corrupt in history after first calling the president himself the most corrupt. He must have received numerous e-mails and phone calls about his remarks because he quickly altered his words but not his meaning.  Mr. Issa is on a mission and is determined to dig and dig until he finds something worth crowing about. These are the people the country voted for to run things.

His co-chair on the Oversight Committee is Democrat Isiah Cummins who will have his hands full as Mr. Issa is setting the tone for the committee hearings. So time and money will be spent as Representative Issa holds his committee hearings,  heaven bent on unearthing as much dirt as he can to try to prove his point. There is something somewhere that states in essence, ” be careful for whom you dig a ditch, as you might well wind up in that ditch.”  Stay tuned, the new posse has fresh horses.