The void left by Speaker John Boehner’s decision to resign has brought tensions to a boil between the top watchdog in the House and the man who preceded him.

In the aftermath of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s decision to bow out of the race to replace Boehner, Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, appeared on Morning Joe Friday to discuss his own prospective candidacy for speaker. The conversation turned naturally to Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, who replaced Issa as head of the Oversight Committee in January and is mounting his own bid for speaker. Issa didn’t pull any punches.

“Jason’s a good man, an honorable man, but he got his job by going to Boehner and saying he would shut down that rancor that was going on, [saying] he would go along/get along, and he’s done that,” Issa said. “He put shining pictures of Utah on the wall and he basically stopped doing [oversight]. There hasn’t been a single committee report or staff report published since he’s been chairman.”

That’s a pretty clear reference to Chaffetz’s decision to take down the portraits of past chairmen that, by tradition, hung in the committee room. “I really felt strongly that in that committee room we should be inspired by those we serve, not inspired by past committee chairmen,” he said when he took office.

#share#The move came shortly after Issa’s portrait was hung, and it was widely seen as a repudiation of Issa’s tenure. “Only someone with a massive inferiority complex would go to the extreme and somewhat unprecedented step of having every former chairman’s portrait removed — especially when the obvious intent is to avoid having Chairman Issa’s portrait hanging over his shoulder for the next few years,” a former staffer told The Hill.

#related#Chaffetz ascended to the Oversight chair after years of tension between Issa and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings, which culminated in Issa muting Cummings’s microphone when the Democratic lawmaker tried to give a statement after Issa had adjourned a hearing on the scandal-plagued IRS. Issa apologized, but Democrats used the event to discredit his investigations.

“The fact is, [Chaffetz]’s a good guy, but whatever he was as a freshman — when he was a fighter on our committee, when he was trying to hold government accountable — he took a break from that,” Issa said on Friday. “I think that’s going to hurt him. . . . It already hurt him. He didn’t have 30 votes going into the [speaker’s] race. I don’t think he’s going to get to 240.”

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.