Joe McCarthy redux

As Darrell Issa shows, it’s a bad time to be a demagogue

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Friday, April 11, 10:39 AM

I have here in my hand a list of six people who think Darrell Issa is a fellow traveler of Joseph McCarthy.

I compiled these names while watching Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, lead his panel’s proceedings Thursday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress. Among the half-dozen Democrats who made the comparison:

“What we’re about today brings us right back to the McCarthy era,” Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) said.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) accused Issa of “stripping away the constitutional rights of an American” in a way that “has not been taken by Congress since the days of Senator McCarthy.”

The ranking Democrat on the panel, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said Issa was attempting “something that even Joe McCarthy could not do in the 1950s.”

(More here.)