Last month, House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) leaked an effort to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress to the media — Issa is upset that Holder’s followed a longstanding Department of Justice practice against endangering ongoing investigations by turning over documents concerning those investigations. Since then, Issa’s become more and more isolated. A broad coalition of senior law enforcement executives came out against his crusade against Holder earlier this month, and even the House Republican leadership has been reluctant to support Holder’s efforts.

Now, according to The Hill, Issa’s crusade appears to be collapsing even among his fellow Republican committee members:

Two of the committee’s 23 Republicans have declined to support the measure at this point, while six other GOP panel members did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the last two weeks.

When compared with the 15 Republicans on the committee who have actively been speaking in favor of the measure, the silence, lack of outspoken support and desire by these eight GOP caucus members to avoid the issue could be a problem for Issa. . . . With only 15 committee Republicans publicly supporting the resolution — and no Democrats — Issa falls short of the 21 votes he needs to pass it out of the 40-member panel to the House floor.

In 2010, when Issa was preparing to take the Oversight gavel, he spoke of his plans as if he were the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Issa promised “hundreds of hearings” intended to “measure failures” by the federal government under President Obama, and he highlighted this promise with a braggadocious Twitter avatar depicting himself as a stick-figure policeman sternly keeping watch over the Capitol.

Less than two years later, Issa primary accomplishments are an all-male panel on women’s health, a bizarre conspiracy theory about about a Rube Goldberg-like plan to undermine the Second Amendment, and, now, a witchhunt against the Attorney General that even his fellow Republican lawmakers seem reluctant to support.

House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) claim that Attorney General Eric Holder should be held in contempt for declining to turn over records of ongoing criminal investigations to Issa’s committee has not been received well by people who actually know something about law enforcement. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey warned that Issa’s crusade against Holder has “distracted the Department of Justice in its efforts to assist state and local law enforcement — particularly in the area of violent crime prevention and suppression,” and a group of senior African-American law enforcement officials similarly warned that Issa’s efforts are “an impediment to the vigorous enforcement of violence and crime.”

Indeed, Issa’s overreach against Holder extended so far that even the House Republican Leadership is trying to reign him in. Nevertheless, a core group of House freshmen are now trying to pressure them to ignore the wishes of law enforcement:

In a letter to Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.); Reps. Sandy Adams (Fla.), Ben Quayle (Ariz.), Tim Griffin (Ark.), Dennis Ross (Fla.), Tom Marino (Pa.) and Trey Gowdy (S.C.) argued that “the House of Representatives has seen its proper oversight function thwarted and obstructed. It’s time for the House to formally recognize the obvious — that Attorney General Holder has not and will not cooperate with the legitimate investigation launched by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is therefore in contempt of Congress.”

For weeks, Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.) has unsuccessfully lobbied leadership to allow contempt proceedings to begin against Holder.

Last week, even Eric Cantor seemed to understand that Issa’s crusade went too far. Cantor and his fellow members of the House leadership will now have to decide whether to abandon that good sense, ignore the wishes of law enforcement, and pick up his own pitchfork alongside the House freshmen.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) talked a big talk when he was preparing to take over as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2010. He promised “hundreds of hearings” intended to “measure failures” by the federal government under President Obama. His office was inundated with resumes from conservative lawyers looking to make a name for themselves as Obama killers. Issa even changed his Twitter avatar into a braggadocious image of himself as a stick-figure policeman sternly keeping watch over the Capitol.

A year and a half later, all those eager young lawyers who took jobs under Issa might be reconsidering their career choice. As Oversight Chair, Issa’s proved far more adept at booking himself on Fox News than he has at actually uncovering real scandals. He’s used his media celebrity status to tout bizarre conspiracy theories, such as a claim that a series of botched law enforcement operations begun under the Bush Administration were actually secret Obama plot to undermine the Second Amendment. His highest profile hearing to date was an all-male panel on contraception that did far more to embarrass conservatives than it did to provide government oversight. Issa’s compared himself to Martin Luther King, Jr. in response to criticism of how he wields his gavel. And he turned oversight of one of the few legitimate scandals his Committee has focused upon — the botched “gun running” operations along the Mexican border that rightfully led to several Justice Department officials losing their jobs or being demoted — into a baseless campaign to pin blame for these operations on Attorney General Eric Holder.

Indeed, Issa’s overreach has become so apparent that even the House leadership appears to be losing faith in his judgment:

Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California have decided to slow Rep. Darrell Issa’s drive to hold the attorney general in contempt over the controversial Fast and Furious program, a move that could infuriate conservatives who have been calling for Holder’s resignation.

The delay could be a month or even longer, according to lawmakers and aides familiar with the issue.

Some within House GOP leadership circles would like Issa to abandon his plan for a committee and floor vote, which was sparked by a 64-page memo last week, which laid out the case for contempt.

This is not the first time Issa’s self-promoting approach to his job sparked tension between himself and other top House Republicans. Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) publicly disagreed with Issa’s hostile approach to an agreement between the Obama Administration and the auto industry over emissions standards. And Issa “ruffled the feathers” of fellow committee chair John Mica (R-FL) after Issa appeared to push Mica out of the spotlight once a scandal involving the General Services Administration started to receive media attention.

Nevertheless, the most recent disagreement over whether to move forward with Issa’s anti-Holder crusade appears to be the first time the House’s most senior leaders publicly made their disagreement with Issa known, and that alone is significant. When even Eric Cantor thinks you are overreaching, it’s a good sign that you might need to dial it back a few notches.

In 2006, under President George W. Bush, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began the first of a series of misguided operations that allowed illegal guns to be sold to arms traffickers and, eventually, to Mexican drug cartels. At least two of these guns were later used to kill a federal agent. These operations were misguided from the very beginning, and they deserve the kind of thorough investigation the Justice Department’s Inspector General is currently trying to conduct — as well as new procedures to ensure that similar mistakes are not made in the future.

Unfortunately, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) sees things differently. For more than a year, he has compounded the tragedy of these botched operations by treating them as little more than an opportunity to embarrass Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration. Issa’s held half a dozen hearings on “Fast and Furious,” one of the botched operations, but refused to call Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was in charge of the Justice Department when these operations were conceived. He’s led a months-long witchhunt for proof that Holder was somehow responsible for the operations, grasping at increasingly thin straws throughout this effort. And he’s touted the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Obama Administration somehow wants to harness these botched efforts to “take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.”

And now, Issa’s going to escalate his inquisition even further:

Republican House leaders have drafted a proposed contempt of Congress citation against Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in which they charge that he and his Justice Department have repeatedly “obstructed and slowed” the Capitol Hill investigation into the ATF’s flawed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation.

The 48-page draft citation is being drawn up by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Top committee officials recently met for most of a day in the House speaker’s office and were given the green light to proceed toward a contempt citation, according to sources who declined to be identified.

If adopted by the GOP-led House, the contempt resolution would be sent to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington or perhaps an independent counsel in an attempt to force the Justice Department to provide tens of thousands of internal documents to the committee.

Notably, Issa did nothing to inform the committee’s minority members of this pending citation — Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) learned about it from the press. A tactic which, in Cummings’ words, “suggests that [Issa is] more interested in perpetuating [his] partisan political feud in the press than in obtaining any specific substantive information relating to the Committee’s investigation.”

More importantly, there is a very good reason why DOJ has not turned over every single document Issa seeks — those documents could undermine countless ongoing criminal investigations. Many of the documents Issa seeks are confidential materials concerning open investigations. Such documents are not subject to congressional subpoena because revealing them would also reveal “strategies and procedures that could be used by individuals seeking to evade [DOJ's] law enforcement efforts.”

Moreover, as President Reagan’s Justice Department warned in the 1980s, the Constitution’s separation of powers prevents such documents from being revealed to Congress because of the risk that the legislature could “exert pressure or attempt to influence the prosecution of criminal cases.” The Constitution separates lawmaking from enforcement because the framers feared that combining the two would be “the very definition of tyranny,” yet Issa seeks to erode this understanding as well.

America deserves a thoughtful and objective investigation into the ill-conceived operations that armed drug cartels and killed at least one federal official. Instead, they are getting partisan grandstanding that does nothing but undermine the Justice Department’s ability to do its job.

Conservative conspiracy theories have had a fun ride since President Obama took office.

First, Barack Obama was a Muslim. Then, he was born in Kenya instead of the United States and only served as president via a forged birth certificate. Then, his decisions as president can only be understood through the frame of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”.

Now, according to the latest tale, courtesy of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), President Obama wants to “convert [our Constitution] to some South African Constitution.”

Issa made the curious accusation Friday at the California Republican Party’s Spring Convention in Burlingame:

ISSA: We’re going to establish a very different policy. One, that we have a president who will respect the Constitution, not try to convert it to some [inaudible] South African Constitution. [Applause]

Listen to it:

Issa likely conflated the erroneous accusation that President Obama wants “some South African Constitution” with and equally erroneous accusation that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg prefers the South African Constitution that has recently infected right-wing commentary.

Earlier this month, Ginsburg told an audience in Egypt that other countries’ constitutions may be better models for their burgeoning democracy than the United States Constitution because more recently drafted constitutions are often more precise in laying out individual rights. If Issa had bothered to the entire interview, however, he would have heard her stirring praise for the First Amendment, her references to the “genius” of our Constitution, and her statement about how powerful it is that our Constitution places power in “We the People.” Moreover, if Issa paid attention to the views of Ginsburg’s conservative colleagues, he would know that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia made a similar point when he testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the Soviet Union’s bill of rights “was much better than ours.”

Yet, even if Ginsburg had claimed that South Africa’s legal traditions are inherently superior to ours, her comments are hardly indicative of President Obama’s views because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is actually an entirely different person than Barack Obama. To help Issa understand this difficult concept, ThinkProgress has prepared the following visual aide:

Hat-tip: @lhfang