'We’re going to handle this in a very deliberative way,' Rep. Tim Murphy said. | REUTERS ACA hearings: Helping or heckling?

There’s congressional oversight that answers everyone’s most urgent questions — and then there’s just heckling from the partisan peanut gallery.

Over the next few weeks, Republicans are going to have to decide which path they’re going to take as they open hearings into the broken Obamacare website.


There’s a wealth of real questions to be answered at the hearings, starting with Thursday’s testimony by a group of contractors that worked on the website. What, exactly, went wrong with the development of the federal health insurance exchange? Who dropped the ball? And can it actually be patched up on the fly?

( Understanding Obamacare: A guide to the ACA)

Those are the most urgent questions that will be on lawmakers’ minds at the House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing Thursday and the others that will follow. The problem is, the hearings will be run by the same House Republicans who don’t even want the law in the first place, and have gone through 40-plus repeal votes and a politically disastrous government shutdown to prove it.

So Republicans have a lot to prove in the hearings. They can use the investigative powers of Congress pry out the answers to the serious questions that everyone has about the website — Democrats as well as Republicans — and repair their standing with the public by showing how thoughtful oversight ought to be done.

Or they can spend the whole time yelling, “BOOOOO! This is never going to work.”

( PHOTOS: HealthCare.gov: 10 quotes from Kathleen Sebelius)

Top Republicans insist they can keep the hearings on the correct side of the line. They say they can stick to a just-the-facts approach and focus on issues that all Americans should be concerned about — especially whether $400 million of taxpayers’ money was wasted in building an Obamacare website that’s mostly unworkable.

“This is a hearing where we don’t have the answers. We’re going to handle this in a very deliberative way,” Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Energy & Commerce oversight subcommittee, said of Thursday’s hearing. “Is it fixable, and if not, should we put a pause on this ‘tech surge’? Are we going to spend hundreds of millions more on this, just to overhaul the engine of a car that’s still moving?”

“Every time we asked [the administration] for details, they said, ‘Don’t worry,’” Murphy told POLITICO. “My concern is that they weren’t upfront with us. Either they didn’t have any way to get the information, or they weren’t going to tell us. I don’t know which it was.”

( WATCH: 7 quotes on Obamacare glitches)

Experts on oversight say there’s no way Congress could avoid having these hearings. Even if Republicans really just want to repeal the law, the website is still “a problem that needs to be fixed,” said Angela Canterbury, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, which conducts seminars for congressional aides on how to do investigations.

But Democrats insist there’s no way for Republicans to do Obamacare oversight well — because it’s too obvious that the Republicans aren’t actually trying to make the law work better. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a Democratic member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, didn’t even wait for a reporter to finish asking the question.

“No!” Connolly said.”They’re going to say their motivation is just to make it work so everyone can have affordable health care. How can you say that? They just shut down the government.”

( POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)

Thursday’s hearing is likely to be just the first in a series. Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is likely to face blistering questions when she testifies before before the Energy & Commerce panel. The Ways and Means Committee will also hear next week from Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the law’s implementation.

Rep. Darrell Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been sending lists of questions to Sebelius, Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, and five technology companies about the website effort, signalling that a hearing probably isn’t far off. And House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has asked Sebelius for a breakdown of the costs of the “tech surge.”

Keeping a hearing from drifting into grandstanding is “always a challenge,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan said Wednesday. “But we’ve got serious members, and they’re going to ask serious questions.”

“The implementation has been a disaster. We want to find out why, and what’s happened to the money that’s been spent, and who’s going to be held accountable,” said Camp.

But not all of the Republicans on Camp’s committee are above a little old-fashioned Obamacare bashing — a sign that any discipline that occurs at the hearings probably won’t last very long.

“The problems with Obamacare are so pervasive that they bear a deeper examination,” Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, chairman of the Ways and Means health subcommittee, told POLITICO Wednesday. “There’s a lot of fear. A lot of people are getting cancellation notices. Why don’t we give people a choice on whether you need to go into this thing or not?”

“You think this website is bad? Wait until the government starts making the decisions about patient care, and reimbursements and treatments,” Brady said.

And even Energy & Commerce Commitee Chairman Fred Upton suggested to a Michigan radio station on Tuesday that he expected to find more damaging information about the law.

“I think one of the things that we’re going to discover here this week and in the ensuing weeks is … this is going to be a hacker’s dream in terms of being able to get personal information, credit information and everything else,” Upton said in the radio interview. “There are not the protections here. It is just awful.”

Democrats say they’d love to have serious hearings, because they’re worried about the busted website, too — but they just don’t believe the Republicans are actually trying to solve problems. “I wish we could join together and have a clean hearing on the mechanics of what went wrong and how to fix it without grandstanding, but they’ve shown no ability to resist,” Connolly said.

Other Obamacare supporters are less charitable.

“You could call what the Republicans are engaging in hypocrisy, but that would be an insult to hypocrites,” said Brad Woodhouse of Americans United For Change, which is leading a war-room effort to fight GOP attacks on the law.

There’s one ray of hope for Republicans, though: Democrats are furious with the Obama administration, too. Administration officials got an earful from House Democrats in a closed briefing Wednesday, and some are calling for special measures to keep consumers from being penalized.

That raises the possibility that, even if Democrats don’t take the Republicans seriously, they’ll still give the hearings reluctant support by asking tough questions of their own.

The most effective congressional hearings are the kind that have bipartisan support, in which the chairman and the ranking member at least agree on the general contours of the investigation and on the legitimacy of the subject, according to Raymond V. Shepherd III, a former investigator for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the House Energy & Commerce Committee.

“When you have bipartisan cooperation, you minimize the opportunity for finger-pointing that distracts from the facts they’re supposed to be uncovering,” said Shepherd, now a partner at the Venable law firm.

Right now, though, that kind of trust is hard to find.

A lot of the Democratic anger is directed at Issa, who they believe is too quick to jump to conclusions about White House involvement in a scandal. With the Obamacare website, for example, they jumped on Issa for sending out a letter Tuesday that suggested the Medicare agency backed up its requests to CGI, the main website contractor, by saying, “this is what the White House wants.”

That account of the briefing with CGI officials suggests that the White House was deeply involved in the website, the committee Democrats say — but when they were asked if there was actual direct evidence that the White House was calling the shots, the CGI officials said there wasn’t.

“It is no secret that Chairman Issa co-sponsored H.R. 2, the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, voted more than 40 times to delay, defund, or repeal the law, and joined Speaker Boehner in shutting down the government for three weeks, wasting billions of dollars. So it is difficult to take seriously his crocodile tears about consumers facing delays on the website when he has done everything in his power to prevent these same consumers from getting access to affordable, quality health insurance,” Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement to POLITICO.

Issa’s aides, however, say the Democrats were just creating a distraction from the point of the letter, which was that the Medicare agency justified its requests by saying the contractor had to do certain things because the White House wanted them done that way. And they don’t think the Democrats have shown enough interest to ask their own questions about what went wrong with the website.

“If there’s going to be a serious bipartisan effort, the Democrats are going to have to ask serious questions, too,” said Issa spokesman Frederick Hill.

And Issa’s team said the Obamacare investigation doesn’t have to descend into the typical partisan sniping if it sticks to a basic subject: whether the broken website was a waste of taxpayer money.

“Whether you’re a supporter of the law or don’t think it was the right way to go, it doesn’t change the fact that this website cost $400 million, and now there are grumblings that it it’s up to $600 million,” said Hill. “What we want the American people to see is the unvarnished truth, so people can make their own judgments about what’s the right way to go.”

There are a few general rules about how to do congressional oversight well. Canterbury says the committees should never lose sight of the goal of finding solutions to the website problems. “It’s incumbent upon them to conduct oversight, and absolutely, there should be problem-solving as a major focus on the hearings,” she said.

Oh, and try not to beat up the witnesses too badly. That could be hard for Republicans to resist when Sebelius testifies next week — especially since some of them have called for Sebelius to resign and could do it again to her face.

“Generally, antagonistic and abusive questions don’t go over well with the public unless there’s specific fraud or abuse being investigated,” said Shepherd.

But as long as Republicans stick to general themes — why was the implementation bungled and was the money wasted — they’ll be fine, according to GOP strategist Kevin Madden.

“It’s simple. Focus on the basics and follow the money. The public has great appreciation for both,” Madden said.