Will The GOP Overplay Its Hand?

Drum wonders whether Republicans can capitalize on the Obamacare fiasco:

There’s plenty of meat available in an investigation of the Obamacare rollout. But a good investigation will go slowly, taking pains not to drown officials in a blizzard of subpoenas while they’re in the middle of fighting a fire. A good investigation will also focus a lot of its effort on real issues of procurement and how the federal government handles IT projects. It won’t be just a fishing expedition for emails that might be embarrassing to Obama staffers. …

Can Issa restrain his attack dog personality enough to understand that? Will the tea party caucus allow it? Or will the whole thing quickly devolve into a barrage of subpoenas that are so obviously politically motivated that no one takes them seriously anymore? We’ll see, but I’d put my money on the latter right now.

Waldman places the same bet:

If you’re a Republican member of Congress, this is coming at a critical time, because it’s around now when your potential primary opponents are deciding whether they want to run against you in next year’s election. That gives you an incentive to prove to the folks back home that you’re as conservative as the nuttiest Tea Partier. It isn’t hard to do, really—all that’s necessary is to go on television and tell the Fox News host that you’re deeply concerned that Healthcare.gov was intentionally made to work improperly as a pretext for the socialist Obama administration to collect all our DNA to facilitate herding us into FEMA concentration camps (or something like that). Which helps make your primary challenge less likely, but doesn’t serve the party’s larger purpose of convincing the American public that the GOP is not, in fact, a party of extremists who don’t care about governing.