The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa’s perch, has released a new report on the practice of now-defunct mortgage lender Countrywide handing out special mortgages at low rates to members of Congress and other key officials through their “VIP” program. And it does not appear to pick sides or divvy up the information to protect one party or the other.

Cummings has the potential to be a worthy adversary to Darrell Issa. But the way in which the leadership went about this was pretty ham-fisted.

Last night, it appeared that Elijah Cummings would attempt to leapfrog seniority and obtain the ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee with the backing of outgoing ranking member Ed Towns. However, Towns reversed course last night, saying in a statement, “I support Carolyn Maloney to become Ranking Member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. She is next in line on the Committee, she has the seniority and competence to serve the Caucus well.”

Ed Towns will give up his post as the Democratic ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, setting up a potential battle for that spot, opposite Darrell Issa, who has promised vigorous and probably endless oversight of the Obama Administration.

In the BP disaster we have seen a pattern from MMS of outright ignoring their responsibilities. So it’s worth probing again the failures at the agency. And the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform plans to do just that.

The battle for transparency at the Federal Reserve just ratcheted up a notch. Edolphus Towns, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, just issued a subpoena to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, asking for documents related to AIG and their counter-party payments.

Ed Towns, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, just announced that he would hold hearings into the emails that show how the New York Federal Reserve delayed disclosure of AIG counter-party payments, hiding public information from federal regulators.