If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the House GOP is insane. Last February, an article in Bloomberg Businessweek highlighted that since the Solyndra bankruptcy last year:
House Republicans have sent 32 congressional letters, compelled 187,000 pages of administration documents, 72,000 pages of documents from Solyndra investors, 9 committee staff briefings, 5 committee hearings, and a sworn committee interview with the Obama bundler who raised money from people involved in the company. Much (but not all) of the committee’s $7 million budget has been devoted to funding this inquisition. And it’s turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.
Since that article came out, Secretary Chu was brought to testify again in March, a dozen subpoenas were issued to current and former DoE employees and contractors, some of which were delivered by armed U.S. Marshals, and Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight committee, is pressing the Secretary to appear again on September 20th. Despite Issa’s many repeated attempts, no evidence of wrongdoing has surfaced. We’ve written quite a bit about Solyndra and, in short, there was zero evidence of wrongdoing, it had attracted a substantial amount of private capital, and was named the top clean-tech company in 2010 by the Wall Street Journal.