I WANT IT MY WAY — AND NOW

Give-us-what-we-want-when-we-want-it attitudes are often found on a toddler’s playground but don’t belong in hearing rooms of the U.S. Capitol and in discussions about one of the nation’s top utilities.

But that’s what was on display this week as Attorney General William Barr testified before the U.S. House Appropriations, Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee, and as Bill Johnson ended his tenure as chief executive officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The attorney general was called to the committee to discuss his department’s needs in the fiscal 2020 budget, but that’s not what House Democrats wanted to talk about. No, indeed. They wanted to know why the man before them hadn’t given each of them copies of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

They didn’t care about whether Russia interfered with the election, though. That already had been established. What they wanted to see was what possible damaging evidence might be contained in the report on President Donald Trump. They wanted that because Barr had quickly summed up the report’s conclusions a couple of weeks ago that were just the opposite of what they hoped to see.

Mueller, according to a summary Barr released about the special counsel’s report, concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the president and Russia regarding the election, and that he could not make a case that there was any obstruction of justice by the president.

The attorney general, on the very weekend he released his letter, said he hoped in reasonable time to be able to release the whole report, with redactions for matters of national security. Trump, himself, said he had no problem with the report being released.

But since then, Barr has been treated by Democrats and the national media as if he had said no one was going to see the report until they pried it from his cold, dead hands. Tuesday’s hearing was evidence.

› “The American people have been left with many unanswered questions.”

› The letter is “unacceptable.” “Your letter raises more questions than answers.”

› “[Your conclusions are] more suspicious than impressive.”

› “[I]t seems like your mind was made up. How did you do it?”

› “Do you appreciate the importance of the full disclosure of this report?”

Early in his testimony, Barr again said he hopes the Mueller report, with redactions, would be available “within a week.” He also said he would testify again after the report is released.

Though hounding the attorney general to give answers he’s already given and make promises he’s already made may make Democrats feel self-important on live television, such political theater is not lost on the American people, who have seen a president put through two years of smears without evidence. And it only diminishes those people making the charges.

TVA and Johnson endured similar haranguing upon his exit. He, among other accomplishments, cut the agency’s debt by $3.5 billion, added $48 billion in business investments (that will add 420,000 jobs), completed a combined-cycle natural gas plant ahead of schedule and under budget, reduced the cost of wholesale power 2% from 2013 levels and phased out more than half the coal plants TVA once operated.

He also has overseen the addition of one gigawatt of solar power and 1,400 megawatts of wind energy to the agency’s resources. And just last week the agency began soliciting proposals from renewable energy developers for 200 megawatts of green energy that can be brought online by the end of 2022.

But critics don’t think he’s sunk enough money into renewables. TVA had considered building a $2.5 billion transmission line to carry 3,500 megawatts of wind energy to the Tennessee Valley from Texas and Oklahoma, but the agency’s long-term power needs and the projected cost didn’t make it a good buy.

“TVA used to be a leader in solar and wind energy,” said frequent agency detractor Stephen Smith, executive director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, “but now it is trailing behind other utilities in the South.”

What Johnson was hired to do (and what is required by the TVA Act), and what he did, was to run TVA efficiently and deliver power to its rate-payers as inexpensively as was practical.

We’ve maintained, and we think the agency believes, that when the non-subsidized price for renewable energy roughly equals that of other energy sources, even more green energy should be used.

Johnson also faced deserved scrutiny on the purchase of two jets and a helicopter in an effort to get around the Tennessee Valley quicker, but that transportation kerfuffle is a drop in the bucket for the good he did for the agency.

Unfortunately, TVA critics don’t believe the agency is doing anything right when it is not doing everything critics would have it do.

Always getting what you want when you want it is not grown-up thinking, though. Real life is compromise, give-and-take and working together. We’d like to see a little more interest in that from those who always want their way.