Hoping To Make Sunlight Obama's Stained Dress

From CNN:

White House to Face Subpoenas on Solyndra

The Congressional committee investigating the Solyndra scandal voted to widen its net for subpoenaing White House documents.

You may have heard about this scandal already, but the recap goes... the Department of Energy floated Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturing company, $535 million in loans back in 2010.  Last summer, the company filed for bankruptcy, taking that federal loan down the toilet with it.  What makes it troubling for Obama is that reviewers warned there were potential problems with the company back in 2009, but the White House urged for quick approval of the loan.

There's also stuff like this:

I actually wouldn't recommend watching the whole thing because it's pretty dry, but it's basically CSPAN footage of Obama doing a bit of comedy, then talking about how awesome Solyndra will be.  There's also stuff like this:

It's not crazy to say that the White House took personal pride in this Solyndra deal, and here was Obama's response to Solyndra's failing:

Even though $535 million is a lot of money, it's true that there are risks involved with any loan, so there are a lot of people (probably led by Obama and Biden) who want to paint the whole Solyndra fiasco as regrettable, but otherwise not a big deal.  The Washington Post disagrees:

Solyndra Loan: White House Pressed On Review Of Solar Company Now Under Investigation

Essentially, emails indicated that the White House wanted the loan review rushed so that Biden could announce the approval at a Solyndra ground-breaking press event.  From the WP article:

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

And another:

In one e-mail, an assistant to Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, wrote on Aug. 31, 2009, to OMB about the upcoming Biden announcement on Solyndra and asked whether “there is anything we can help speed along on OMB side.” 

An OMB staff member responded: “I would prefer that this announcement be postponed. . . . This is the first loan guarantee and we should have full review with all hands on deck to make sure we get it right.”

And another:

In August 2009, e-mail exchanges between Energy Department staff members pointed out that a credit-rating agency predicted that the project would run out of cash in September 2011. Solyndra shut its doors on the final day of August.

Finally:

Questions about the selection process were first raised in a July 2010 audit by the Government Accountability Office. It concluded that the Energy Department “lacked appropriate tools for assessing the progress” of the loan program and that the department treated applicants inconsistently, “favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.”

So the White House was clearly guilty of being overeager... but they claim they had no interest in swaying the decision of the loan package, they were just annoyingly curious about the timing of the decision.  They might say that maybe if the Energy Department had done its job competently, none of this would have happened.  


All of this led to an FBI raiding Solyndra looking into potential wrong-doing.  That led to a Congressional investigation, which led to hyperbole.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of that panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee, said last week that the FBI raid confirmed their belief that the “darling” of Obama’s green-jobs program was a “bad bet” from the beginning.

“Solyndra was the hallmark of the President’s green jobs program and widely promoted by the administration as a stimulus success story, right up until its bankruptcy and FBI raid,” Upton and Stearns said in a statement on Tuesday. “Let’s learn the lessons of Solyndra before another dollar goes out the door.”

Green jobs declared guilty by association.  I'm not saying what happened with Solyndra should be overlooked, but here's a factoid from the following article:

Five Myths About The Solyndra Collapse

Specifically:

Solyndra proves that energy-loan guarantees are a flop. Not exactly. The Energy Department’s loan-guarantee program, enacted in 2005 with bipartisan support,has backed nearly $38 billion in loans for 40 projects around the country. Solyndra represents just 1.3 percent of that portfolio — and, as yet, it’s the only loan that has soured. Other solar beneficiaries, such as SunPower and First Solar, are still going strong. Meanwhile, just a small fraction of loan guarantees go toward solar. The program’s biggest bet to date is an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for a nuclear plant down in Georgia.

So the plan on the whole seems to be working out (maybe because those loans weren't rushed).


But going back to the CNN article at the top, this expanded subpoena stuff feels somewhat similar to Congressional investigations of the Clinton White House that led to the President himself committing perjury over a blow job.  It started as Ken Starr's investigation into Whitewater, but, a hundred million dollars later, it ended up about Lewinsky (and to Starr's impeccable detecting credit, he never really found much to go after, including Lewinsky, which was dumped on his lap by Linda Tripp).


Now we have a Congressional investigation that hasn't really been able to find anything that sticks, so they decide to dig deeper.  It's not necessarily a bad instinct as long as it's honorable and not a "long as it takes, as much as it costs" witch hunt.  


And like the Clinton scandal, there are a few hypocrites working the opposing side (what's up former Reps and admitted adulterers Henry Hyde, Robert Livingston, Newt Gingrich - a possible two or three time offender, Dan Burton, and Helen Chenoweth-Hage).


We'll turn here for the full timeline:

Solyndra: Advanced By Bush For Two Years (Solyndra Timelime)

The quick takeaway from that article:

To set the record straight, Climate Progress is publishing this timeline — verified by Department of Energy officials — that shows how the loan guarantee came together under both administrations. In fact, rather than rushing the loan for Solyndra through, the Obama Administration restructured the original Bush-era deal to further protect the taxpayers’ investment

So it starts with the 2005 passing of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which establishes a fund for these kinds of loans.  Bush tries his hardest to get the loan approved, even going so far as a last ditch effort right before leaving office so that he could take the credit.  Obama's team comes in and restructures the review of the loan, their own push follows, and then the collapse.

Rep. Cliff Stearns leads the subcommittee subpoenaing the White House.  He's quoted above knocking Obama's green jobs initiatives.  Last year, he lobbied to get one of those green jobs things built in his district:

Stearns Criticized For Inconsistency On Green Jobs Stimulus Money

Saft America, a lithium-ion battery manufacturer, built a plant in Jacksonville, FL, a part of the district Stearns represents.  From the article:

”Nearly half the cash for the new Saft America Inc. facility was provided through a cost-sharing arrangement funded through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” — a stimulus program that Stearns has campaigned against.

I guess he opposes the Act as a whole but still helped get Saft America built in Jacksonville with the Act's money.

I know it's not as sexy as Clinton being hounded for marital infidelity by a bunch of adulterers, but, to put it in Clinton-era BJ terms... the angle of the dangle does depend on the heat of the meat or something.  It's the mentality that I feel permeates Congressional republicans when a democrat sits in the White House.  Any opening needs to be turned into an effort to bring down the Presidency as fast as possible.  One term is fine, but what if we impeached on that BJ perjury charge?

It's one thing to investigate on the merits of the case, it's another to hypocritically grandstand.  Of course, there's no shortage of hypocritical grandstanding on either end of the political spectrum, but I feel the weaponization of that grandstanding is something the right has down a bit better than the left.

Regardless, it's part of the rot attacking our legislative core.