The Decline of Congressional Hearings
They're supposed to provide oversight. But especially in the MAGA era, they mostly provide bombast.
Dogberry, comically bumbling chief constable in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Congressional hearings aren’t what they used to be. The presidential historian Tevi Troy has cited several reasons for this. The end of the seniority system left committee chairmen less powerful, and therefore less able to keep the questioning focused and orderly. Members show up less. When they do show up, they’re more inclined to give speeches than to ask questions, and if they ask a question they often cut off the witness before he can complete an answer.
It’s gotten much worse in this age of MAGA demagogy, but these complaints aren’t new. Troy made his case nine years ago. Even hearings that today are thought of as exemplary and historic, like the Senate Select Committee hearings on Watergate, privileged yak-yak over fact-gathering. Wilfrid Sheed opined at the time that the committee’s stunning revelations came about in spite of Senators’ questioning, not because of it. He described the proceedings (somewhat cynically) as “backstairs comedy to please the groundlings”:
The essence of the joke as I see it was to take a committee that didn’t really want to find out anything and confront these monkeys with witnesses who insisted on telling them anyway. [Watergate burglar] James McCord persisted in the teeth of the most inane questioning ever flung together. The President’s man, old Fly-Me-to-Florida [Republican Senator Edward Gurney], tried to bore us to sleep with minutiae about the door handle; the other fellow, the junior statesman [ranking committee member Howard Baker, also Republican], did it with philosophy (what-is-your-concept-of-the-role-of snooze); the Falstaff of the outfit [committee chair Sam Ervin, a Democrat] couldn’t seem to follow anything that took place after lunch and blustered in proportion, but this might have been the most fiendish ruse of all for avoiding fresh information.
For today’s House Republicans, matters have degenerated to the point that even when presented with a Biden official entirely worth taking down, they’re too muddle-headed to do the job. That was the case Wednesday when the House Financial Services Committee hauled in Martin Gruenberg. As chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Gruenberg has presided over a toxic work environment, amply documented in a Wall Street Journal story last November and an independent investigation whose findings were released last week. Gruenberg should be fired. But the latter-day Dogberrys in charge of the hearing botched the job so thoroughly that it fell to committee Democrats to build a coherent case against Gruenberg. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.