| Democrats on and off Capitol Hill have been complaining about how the House is handling its investigations into President Donald Trump's various misdeeds. After watching the Judiciary Committee hearing Monday featuring Watergate criminal John Dean, I have to say: The critics have a point.
What should be happening? Here's what Norm Ornstein suggested: Democrats need to stage and coordinate hearings across committees and subcommittees, to make sure they do not overload Americans' ability to pay attention. Most important, they need to structure the public hearings in a dramatically different way than usual … No five-minute rounds of questions going down the line of every committee member, leading to utterly disjointed discourse, making it easy for hostile witnesses to evade, filibuster, or otherwise avoid follow-ups and get through a five minute period, which is then followed by a five-minute breather with an ally on the Republican side, and then another five minutes from the next member of the panel that may have nothing to do with the previous round of questions. Read the whole thing for more of his suggested changes. Benjamin Wittes also had some good ideas: Congress needs to prioritize. Members need to figure out what they are trying to achieve—both in terms of what sort of information they are seeking to develop and in terms of what principles of inter-branch relations they are trying to establish … The idea would be to bring the Mueller report to life and, along the way, to establish clearly in case law the ability of Congress to conduct such oversight hearings against a recalcitrant executive. We got none of that on Monday. We didn't get any fact witnesses. We didn't get anything brought to life. We did get a panel that didn't make any sense, and the incoherent parade of committee members that Ornstein warned against.
At one point, the Republicans noted that Dean – who had been President Richard Nixon's White House counsel, and who eventually pleaded guilty to obstructing justice – was there as a prop. That wasn't quite right; he was there as a symbol. The entire message of the hearing, which went on for hours, was basically what Dean embodied: Trump equals Watergate.
Yet even that didn't make much sense. For one thing, it's hard to argue that Trump's various scandals are truly Watergate-like if Democrats aren't moving ahead with impeachment proceedings. For another, the whole thing made for terrible television. Even if the cable news networks had broadcast the event live, it's unlikely that any viewers would've learned much. About the best that the Democrats came up with were some posters that were difficult (at best) to read on C-SPAN.
Republicans weren't exactly impressive – their dedication to conspiracy theories prevents that – but they were at least better organized. They stuck to two or three themes, and at several points members yielded to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio to take the lead in questioning. Granted, Jordan's style is unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already on his side, but the same could be said of committee Democrats, who had much better material to work with.
At the very least, Democrats need to follow the Republican example in future hearings and designate three or four lead members on different topics. That's too bad for the other members who won't get air time, but the priority has to be finding a way to explain the material to the public. That will be even more important when fact witnesses are finally called to testify.
As Ornstein put it, the "larger goal is to build a compelling record, through vivid testimony, of what Trump and his people, including his children, did and did not do, said and did not say truthfully, that is the core of Mueller's report." Members of the House Judiciary Committee didn't do very much to achieve that on Monday. They need to do better.
1. Dan Drezner on how Senate Republicans have treated Trump.
2. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien on how Trump might react as foreign nations take his threats less seriously.
3. Clare Malone draws the unenviable assignment of explaining the path to the nomination for former Senator Mike Gravel; the least we can do is click on it.
4. Jennifer Bendery reports on one of the last anti-abortion Democrats.
5. Kevin Drum on when people lose their cynicism about how politicians talk.
6. David Remnick talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates about reparations.
7. And I'm a day late on this, but we had a local-election runoff on Saturday, and as usual I'll run the stats. Just one thing on my ballot, the mayoral race; others also had city council seats, but not in my precinct. This was the second election and the third vote I've cast this year and of the current two-year cycle. It was the eighth Election Day of the four-year cycle, and I've now cast 148 votes since November 2016. Yes, that's way too many elections, and too many offices.
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