The circus is in town
The establishment of a congressional subcommittee is supposed to advance some public purpose — that is, something beyond the re-airing of political grievances and conspiracy theories in well-appointed hearing rooms, as opposed to the social media platforms where such things are usually blasted out.
But based on what we saw at its inaugural hearing last week, that is precisely what the American people can expect from the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government: the political equivalent of reruns, or the kind of leftovers that can befoul an poorly monitored refrigerator.
The hearing ’s rhetorically threadbare nature was made evident right off the bat: The first panel of witnesses included two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, and ex-democrat and ex-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who used their time to simply repeat rhetoric they ’ve been putting out in other venues, on topics ranging from alleged FBI perfidy to shadowy COVID conspiracies. U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, appearing as a Democratic witness in an attempt to add at least some balance to this cavalcade, noted that his GOP colleagues seemed to lack interest in former President Donald J. Trump’s use of government power to target his enemies and coddle his friends. Even Fox News cut away from the hearings, as if out of concern that even die-hard conservatives were getting a little tired of this content.
If the subcommittee’s first outing had any gravitas whatsoever, it was only in comparison to the hearing held earlier the same week by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. That session was devoted to Twitter, and revisited the platform’s 2020 decision to curtail the dissemination of a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop — a choice many of the same Twitter executives had acknowledged in previous Capitol appearances was a mistake. It also featured tantrums thrown by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert over the fact that these lawmakers had been subject to Twitter sanctions for over-the-line tweets. Again, this was not oversight in the national interest; it was personal vendetta by elected officials whose brand is to present themselves as eternal victims.
While the weaponization panel is only now getting its engine cranked up, there’s already a clear gap between this sort of legislative inquiry and — to name just one recent example — the now-shuttered subcommittee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the building where these hearings were held. The first session of that panel was given over to the accounts of rank-and-file workers who lived through the insurrection, as opposed to a group of lawmakers swapping talking points.
The Jan. 6 subcommittee then went about its work gathering testimony and constructing a portrait of what happened in the months leading up to the attack. When it relaunched its public hearings last spring, it had the goods.
If last week’s hearings are indicative of what Republicans have in store, voters would do well to pay attention — if only for a lesson in how not to do oversight.