Investigation or Fundraiser?
As this election season heats up, we should all seek a better understanding of Congressional inquiries. Let’s turn the prism, and see these hearings in a new light.
The history of the Congressional hearing is mixed. Sometimes, as in the case of Watergate, it was a high quality, public method of exposing truth. It’s wake was long and significant. A president was impeached and resigned before he was tried. Campaign finance rules and oversight ensued.
Sometimes, the Congressional hearing is just political theatre. Inquiries on Capitol Hill got at the facts of the Iran Contra scandal, but precipitated very little actionable reform. Sure, Oliver North went to jail briefly for lying to Congress, but the Reagan Administration was largely untouched and unrepentant (oh, and Ollie North became a hero to the fetishists of the Hard Right, and was enriched by publishers and Fox News, but I digress.)
Sometimes the political theatre has real and damaging results. Take for instance, the McCarthy Era, when one despicable Senator from Wisconsin was able to parlay the “Red Scare” during the Cold War into the wholesale ruination of many lives.
It was only when the Chief Counsel for the United States Army, in defense of a helpless young witness, famously confronted McCarthy with the immortal words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency?” It was the beginning of the end for McCarthy, because the mantle was picked up by Edward R. Murrow of CBS news—this was back when TV news was a trusted institution—and Americans turned on Joe McCarthy, who was thusly forced to slink ignominiously into history.
Today, you can add a new wrinkle to the Congressional hearing. The Republican majority—the one that chairs these committees and has the power to issue subpoenas demanding witnesses appear before them—has a new strategy.
The hearings are raw footage for campaign television commercials. They are the body copy for mailers to the faithful, and fuel for internet-driven conspiracy theories for consumption by the indoctrinated.
At their base, they are show trials intended to keep controversy alive without substantive fact, all in the service of raising the life blood of reelection campaigns—money.
That’s right: they exist not to find truth, but to create compelling commercials, to ruin the reputations of political opponents, to keep the herd’s anger fresh. And, above all else, to fundraise.
Of course Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican, didn’t give Planned Parenthood’s president a chance to actually answer his questions. She was a just prop in his fiction about the selling of baby parts. And of course multiple Benghazi hearings haven’t yielded any new information. As the former Republican counsel to the committee investigating Benghazi admitted publicly last year, they were staged merely to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chance of becoming president.
I’m curious to see how the water crisis in Flint plays out in Congress. The fact that Michigan governor, Rick Snyder, whose appointee ordered the switch that has created an unprecedented public health crisis in a major American city has not been called to testify, is very telling.
Our job as citizens gets harder and harder. Now that we can no longer take Congressional hearings at face value, we have to learn to weigh the organizers’ motives, and decide for ourselves whether the outcome has value.