Posted on 11/13/2013 3:12:12 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) will take his turn at hammering the rollout of ObamaCare on Wednesday when his panel hears testimony from five administration witnesses.
The hearing will mark the culmination of a strategic assault on President Obama’s healthcare plan by congressional Republicans.
It follows a series of tactical document leaks from Issa that have created mini-firestorms for the White House and infuriated the Republican lawmaker’s critics, who accuse him of acting in bad faith over the last month.
In one case, Democrats disputed Issa’s claim that the White House ordered federal health officials to disable the “anonymous shopper” feature on HealthCare.gov over fears that higher premiums would turn applicants away.
This claim was refuted in interviews with administration officials, Democrats on the Oversight panel said in a memo.
While Issa is largely following the playbook he used during past investigations, the ObamaCare issue is proving more widely relevant than his probes of the Internal Revenue Service’s political vetting and the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
The California Republican tends to rely on releasing a slow drip of information, often in the form of redacted documents or partial transcripts, to argue incompetence or political interference on the part of the Obama administration.
His previous investigations have become hot topics in the conservative media but gained less traction in the mainstream press in the absence of details that would fully confirm Issa’s case.
Critics accuse Issa of framing his findings in a way that misleads the media. But analysts see a crucial difference in how he has handled the issue of Obama-Care’s rollout and how he’s benefited from the wider narrative of problems with HealthCare.gov.
“Instead of coming out like Rambo, he’s realized that he can control the narrative, put Democrats on the defensive and still maintain the attention spans of the television networks,” said GOP political strategist Ford O’Connell.
“He’s learned to become a storyteller instead of a flamethrower. … If you can talk people through these issues, you can keep the story alive.”
Wednesday’s hearing comes during a critical week for the Obama administration. After a brief reprieve while the House was in recess, the White House is again under siege amid heightening pressure to modify unpopular pieces of ObamaCare.
Issa’s hearing will be Congress’s sixth since Oct. 1, when the ObamaCare enrollment website launched, but the first that is expected to focus in depth on efforts to repair HealthCare.gov.
The administration is also preparing to release its first official set of enrollment numbers from the new exchanges, another likely topic of discussion.
Estimates that emerged this week suggest that the exchanges failed to meet their enrollment targets during the month of October.
One piece of brighter news came when New York state announced that it had enrolled 50,000 people so far, though it’s unclear how many of those signups were for Medicaid.
Issa’s hearing will present lawmakers with their first opportunity to grill several technical experts within the administration about what went wrong with the enrollment website.
The expected appearance of one of those experts — U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park — tops off a major fight between Issa and Democrats from both the Oversight Committee and at the White House.
Park is scheduled to appear before the panel after a back-and-forth that ultimately led Issa to subpoena him.
The White House had argued that Park was too busy helping the HealthCare.gov repair effort and would happily testify in December.
Democrats continued to lash out at the subpoena this week, arguing it was unnecessary and perhaps an attempt to thwart the fixes at HealthCare.gov.
“Unfortunately, Chairman Issa is conducting this investigation of the Affordable Care Act in the same irresponsible and reckless way he has conducted previous investigations,” Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said.
“He has leaked incomplete, cherry-picked transcript excerpts in an attempt to further his pre-determined political narrative, and he has launched baseless and inflammatory allegations with no evidence to back them up.”
Republicans argue that Park’s appearance is appropriate given his expertise on the federal enrollment site and that Issa’s subpoena is appropriate given his charge of overseeing the executive branch.
Park, a former healthcare tech entrepreneur, was not involved in the construction of HealthCare.gov, but he helped build a precursor during his tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The subpoena was Issa’s third on ObamaCare since Oct. 1 and was welcomed by conservative supporters of the chairman as a sign of his commitment to hammering the administration.
Obama supporter miffed at botched healthcare rollout [A very interesting article.] "......"I'm a 55-year-old woman in excellent health and have a catastrophic health plan," she wrote recently to Obama and California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. "I am completely happy with my plan. I received notice that the plan is being canceled and that to stay with a "comparable" plan my premiums would increase 88%, or $200 extra per month. To add insult to injury, the plan is INFERIOR to my existing plan."
If you guessed that she got no response from any of those elected officials, you win a box of cough drops.
But public officials didn't throw a complete shutout at Davis. She wrote to U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) when she didn't hear from the others, and one of Bass' staffers called Davis to say she'll be looking into the specifics of her case.".........
>> House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) will take his turn at hammering the rollout of ObamaCare
I’m just wondering when Issa will stop starting new nails and actually finish hammering one IN all the way.
When The Hill is posting an article about a Dimocrat issue, they include only Dimocrat quotes to favor it.
But when it is about a Republican story, they include more Dimocrat quotes criticizing it than Republican quotes supporting it.
Amazing.
And while the Republican Establishment could put a nail in the coffin of the Obama Presidency, it chooses to attack its base instead.
There is only one party in Washington: The Re-Election Party, dedicated to the personal enrichment of its members at taxpayer expense.
Article V. is the only solution now. Only the state legislatures can change Washington.
Mark Levin, Liberty Amendments:
http://therightscoop.com/watch-live-now-mark-levin-at-the-reagan-library/
The strategy:
http://www.conventionofstates.com/learn-convention-states-0
That’s the trick AP uses in top of the hour headlines on radio. Watch for males speaking for the conservative argument on abortion and other women’s issues and for announcer narrative laying out the conservative side, while an impassioned voice of a “victim” of this or that speaks for the leftists. Then there’s always the spike.
Also, apparently , AP insists on word for word adherence to the script of the news cast, as all stations, even where conservative hosts read the news between segments, have exactly the same text at a given time.
Issa is like a guy who goes to a Porta Potty and stirs its contents so that it stinks, and then he leaves.
He never finishes what he starts.
How nice...the Uniparty is putting on a show for the little people.
They also cover any GOP investigation as if it’s a sporting match, while any RAT investigation is covered as if it’s an extremely serious search for the truth.
Laughable.
Oh, Dead End Darrel is going to “strike”...again? I’m trembling.
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