Welcome to the Next Two Years of GOP Investigations

The GOP won its very own House! Now's the part where they throw their shit all over the walls. Here are the criminal enterprises, like science and community organizers, that the GOP will use its newfound subpoena power to crush.

One of the reasons that political parties try to win majorities in the House in the first place, aside from being able to pass laws and call dibs on pages, is that you get to hold hearings and compel people to hand over documents and investigate stuff.

Now that Speaker-to-be John Boehner (above) has led his troops to victory, he's licking his chops to get started. But the GOP's chief investigator, soon-to-be chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Darrell Issa, is already making noises today indicating that he will use this awesome new power soberly and purely in the interests of justice.

That's a lie! He will use it to fuck with Obama, as will all his fellow newly minted GOP committee chairs—and they've already started, whispering to the Hill that they're going to demand the White House stop destroying all those documents that there's no evidence the White House is destroying. Because if the White House destroys documents, then Issa and his friends won't have anything to investigate, which would be a shame. Anyway, here are the new Whitewaters:


ACORN oh-so-conveniently filed for bankruptcy on the day before the elections, meaning its not much of an investigative target anymore. And according to its bankruptcy filing, it spent around $10,000 on shredding services since September, so all the good stuff about stealing elections is probably all gone. Issa was the GOP's chief congressional tormentor, and as Talking Points Memo notes in their round-up of potential upcoming investigations, he can't really quit them: His spokesman has threatened to look into the successors that ACORN "morphed" into.

Welcome to the Next Two Years of GOP Investigations


Who needs a reason? The next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith, thinks Obama's failure to protect the border amounts to an abdication of his constitutional oath, which is an impeachable offense. For taking precisely the same approach to illegal immigration as George W. Bush.

Tony Rezko

Don't laugh. The Clintons' Whitewater investment was first reported by the New York Times in March 1992, eight months before Clinton's election. It wasn't until 1994, when the GOP took control of Congress, that congressional investigators started in on it. So don't be surprised if our old friend Tony Rezko—remember the guy who bought the house next door to Obama, which is illegal, apparently?—rears his head again. Especially because Rod Blagojevich's second corruption trial is coming up, and Rahm Emanuel is running for mayor of Chicago. Expect to hear "Chicago-style" a lot more.

Welcome to the Next Two Years of GOP Investigations


In an effort to keep Rep. Joe Sestak from challenging Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primary—because they were scared he'd lose in the general, which is precisely what happened—the White House offered Sestak unspecified "options of service on a presidential or other senior executive branch advisory board." Issa has already called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to look into it, because offering someone a job as an alternative to something else they'd like to do is clearly a crime, even though it happens of necessity every time anyone offers anyone a job, ever.


Joe Barton, the Texas congressman who heroically apologized to BP for America's atrocious overreaction to the uncontrolled release of 180 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, is the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and stands a good chance to take control. And he's itching to blow the lid off the massive fraud that science has perpetrated on the American public by investigating global warming: "The GOP plans to hold high profile hearings examining the alleged 'scientific fraud, behind global warming," writes the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder. It will be like Inherit the Wind, right down to the part where science loses.

Welcome to the Next Two Years of GOP Investigations

The New Black Panther Party

The GOP dispatched "poll watchers" around the country to keep the illegals from voting. But when the "poll watchers" are black, it's a different story—then they're called New Black Panthers and are depriving whites their right to vote. The presence of two of these animals at an urban polling station in 2008 that was destined to go overwhelmingly to Obama, and did in fact do so, is one of the greatest threats to liberty this nation has seen since the Hun, because someone caught them on video that has been looping on Fox News Channel for the last six months. So Lamar Smith will likely launch an investigation in the Judiciary Committee into why the Justice Department hasn't dispatched Predator drones to kill these New Black Panthers.

[Photos via Getty]