The border is being overrun, China is threatening Taiwan, the ports are backed up with goods for the American economy, employment participation is dropping, budget is due, inflation is rising, and covid mandates are causing all sorts of unintended (maybe not?) results. Congress must wrestle with what it should do about all of these crises? No, they know what to do - hold a hearing on one voting audit for one county in Arizona! Something they have nothing to do with since it is all under state/county authority.
The latest one was the Hearing on the Arizona Audit - what a joke…as most of them are.
Here are the process steps observed by a frequent watcher of CSPAN (me):
Party in power picks areas to study that will embarrass the other side and opens a hearing.
It holds them in the morning when cable channels can run them in their entirety, and clips are ready for News @ 5.
Invites witnesses who support their view - the other side can invite, but usually, the majority has veto rights. Drown the ‘other side’ with a demanding discovery process - boxes and boxes of data required that no one will look at.
As a Congressperson, you need to arrive in the meeting room only when it is your turn for questioning (5 minutes), NO need to hear the rest of the hearing - what will you learn? Too busy….
Your questions will be given to you by a large staff - sometimes you have trouble asking the questions because you don’t understand what your staff knows.
The questions will be either to embarrass the witnesses or parrot a message given to you by the respective caucus. I.E., in this one, all the democrats kept bringing up Trump fighting the result - everyone in the room knew that this was already decided and the audit was more interesting than this, but…they have a message that bears repeating. And, repeat, they do. The other side meets and divides up specific areas to question since they only have 5 minutes each.
The questions will be planned to create a neat clip for the nightly news/Twitter.
Many congresspersons use their entire time for making speeches about the subject and have no time left for questions - but they are not there to listen anyway. Why isn’t this a floor speech instead?
You will rarely hear a congressperson ask a witness what legislation is needed to solve the root issues - that would mean legislation…work.
If a witness does not have an answer, ask them to submit it in writing later when nobody will read or care.
Congresspersons will raise motions to attach various news articles or studies to the official record - again; no one will read or care.
There will be NO legislation coming out of this hearing, there usually isn’t, but of course, that is why you hold them, to learn something and how to fix it for the electorate, right?
also, why do most congresspeople love these hearings? Many are lawyers - this is what they trained and live for! A courtroom with cameras!
It will take a revolution of the witnesses to solve this issue - despite the ego boost this attendance provides them as experts, they all need to deny coming - starve the hearings of any experts until they hold fair hearings without cameras. And, if they don’t start legislating, stop again!
Let's Call another Congressional Hearing on....
And we wonder why 535 people can run 300+ million lives ???