{"id":19360,"date":"2024-03-25T09:11:17","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T13:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=19360"},"modified":"2024-03-25T09:11:17","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T13:11:17","slug":"truth-has-no-chance-on-capitol-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/25\/truth-has-no-chance-on-capitol-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth Has No Chance on Capitol Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Truth Has No Chance on Capitol Hill<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/a><\/span> | Mar 25, 2024\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Americans are encouraged to believe that the U.S. Congress is practically on automatic pilot to serve the public. Happily, most Americans are not so gullible and Congress receives much of the contempt it deserves in public opinion polls. But the media and the Washington establishment continue doggedly fighting against the vulgar truth of congressional depravity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seventy years ago, comedian Milton Berle quipped, \u201cYou can send a man to Congress but you can\u2019t make him think.\u201d <\/span>Nothing has improved on that score since the Eisenhower era.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1999, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a study that explained why \u201cthe incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities.\u201d The article concluded that \u201cthose with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.\u201d The article quoted the apt saying by Charles Darwin that \u201cignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.\u201d While the study focused largely on people scoring in the bottom quartile on intelligence tests, the same pattern of overconfidence and incompetence characterizes many members of Congress.<\/p>\n

Farm programs have been among the biggest Washington muddles since the Franklin Roosevelt era<\/strong>. In 1985, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Kika de la Garza (D-TX), urged support for more subsidies based on sheer faith: \u201cI heard a quotation once that said, \u2018Facts are the enemy of truth.\u2019 So forget all the facts and listen to the truth.\u201d That year, The Washington Post<\/em> reported that, during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, Senator David Pryor (D-AR) \u201ccounseled fellow committee members not to confuse themselves by reading details of a pending bill.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOversight\u201d is a polite term for rote congressional procedures designed to avoid discovering information that might embarrass their allies.<\/strong> A senior House Republican admitted in 2004, \u201cOur party controls the levers of government. We\u2019re not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to cause heartburn.\u201d Almost 20 years ago, The Washington Post<\/em> reported that, \u201cafter a series of embarrassing disclosures [on torture and illegal surveillance], Congress is reconsidering its relatively lenient oversight of the Bush administration.\u201d Didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

Most members of Congress are more likely to grovel to federal agencies than to challenge their power. \u201c<\/strong>How are you so great and how can we help you?\u201d is the usual response when the FBI director testified, as Guardian<\/i> columnist Trevor Timm noted. For most congressmen, the worst abuse a government agency can commit is not spending more money in their home district. HUD Inspector General Charles Dempsey explained why massive housing scandals occurred during the 1980s: \u201cCongress was more interested in getting favors from HUD than in overseeing its operations.\u201d Georgetown University Professor P.G. Eddington, a former CIA official, in 2017 lamented \u201cthe House Intelligence Committee\u2019s slow degeneration from overseer to cheerleader of surveillance\u201d over the previous quarter century.<\/p>\n

The behavior of congressmen at a typical hearing is what would get a juror fined and jailed for \u201ccontempt of court\u201d at a trial.<\/strong> Most congressmen do not show up for most hearings, and those who do show up attend sporadically, wandering in and out and paying scant attention to witnesses. Most hearings, especially in the House, showcase congressmen often awkwardly reading questions written out by their aides. An intelligent, spontaneous, piercing follow-up question is as rare as a federal agency requesting a reduction in its budget.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Congress\u2019s follies and depravity were showcased earlier this month<\/strong> when Special Counsel Robert Hur testified on his report on President Joe Biden\u2019s mishandling of classified documents. Hur\u2019s report last month concluded that Biden had \u201cwillfully retained and disclosed classified materials\u201d\u2014violations of federal law. But Hur said that prosecuting him would be dicey because jurors could view Biden as an\u00a0 <\/span>\u201celderly man with poor memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the FBI raided Donald Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago home to seize classified documents in August 2022, Biden said he was stunned that \u201canyone could be that irresponsible.\u201d After Hur\u2019s report came out, Biden angrily declared, \u201cI did not share classified information.\u201d He also proclaimed, \u201cAll the classified documents were in lockable filing cabinets.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

But Hur testified that those claims were \u201cinconsistent with our findings.\u201d Biden\u2019s classified documents were found<\/span> at the Penn Biden Center, in Biden\u2019s Delaware garage, his basement den and third floor den, his main floor office, the University of Delaware, and at the Biden Institute. Leaving classified documents strewn in open boxes in his garage was not quite \u201clocked\u201d away.<\/p>\n

Vilification is the favorite method of suasion on Capitol Hill. T<\/strong>he House Judiciary Committee hearing on Hur\u2019s report was only about \u201cRepublicans trying to re-elect the former white supremacist-in-chief,\u201d according to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO). Fixating on Biden\u2019s document shenanigans could aid Trump and cause the worldwide triumph of tyranny, wailed Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MO). Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) derided Hur as a Republican bootlicker hoping to get a prize appointment if Trump is re-elected.<\/p>\n

The hearing quickly devolved into Three Stooges-caliber antics.<\/strong> One Democrat after another put Hur into a headlock and jammed words into his mouth. When Hur objected to Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) claiming that his report exonerated Biden, she cut him off: \u201cMr. Hur, it is my time.\u201d Democrats seemed to believe that endlessly repeating the word \u201cexoneration\u201d would automatically counteract any Biden dirt that floated to the surface.<\/p>\n

Democrats, veering towards full \u201cManchurian Candidate,\u201d seemed ready to recite with glazed eyes, \u201cJoe Biden is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I\u2019ve ever known in my life.\u201d Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) miraculously proclaimed, \u201cNobody suggests that Biden is senile.\u201d That declaration raised doubts about Cohen\u2019s own cognition\u2014or perhaps he has lived in a hyper-Democrat bubble for the last five years. Biden needed plenty of sycophants because of his hypocrisy, his legal violations, and his brazen falsehoods.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The forty felony charges that Special Counsel Jack Smith filed against Trump for classified document violations were perpetually showcased by Democratic members. But no one explained how Trump\u2019s alleged offenses after January 2021 retroactively exonerated Biden\u2019s perpetual violations of federal classification law stretching back to the 1970s. Republicans wondered at what point in his life Biden became too clueless to be responsible for violating federal law.<\/p>\n

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) explained that Biden knew the rules on classified information but he broke them because he was writing a book and pocketing $8 million. \u201cJoe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules!\u201d Jordan exclaimed. Hur\u2019s report stated that Biden also wrongfully retained classified documents to \u201cbuttress his legacy as a world leader\u201d in his ghostwritten book. It is tricky to understand why Biden would have taken that risk with those documents since the Washington media had coronated him a \u201cworld leader\u201d long ago, perhaps even before his first major plagiarism scandal of the 1980s. Rep. Jordan is seeking the audio tapes from the interview to better elucidate Biden\u2019s mental capacity. Hur stated that his conclusion on Biden\u2019s poor memory was based on the totality of the circumstances of his interaction with the president during the interview.<\/p>\n

Some Republicans were confounded that Hur chose not to recommend criminal charges. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) groused that Hur chose to \u201c<\/span>apply this \u2018senile cooperator\u2019 theory that<\/span> because Joe Biden cooperated and the elevator didn\u2019t go to the top floor, you don\u2019t think you\u2019d get a conviction.\u201d Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) was perturbed that Hur let the president off the hook by claiming in the report<\/span> that Biden didn\u2019t recognize that a \u201cconfidential\u201d marking meant a document was classified\u2014even though Biden stated that he knew that during the interview (D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: the FBI let Hillary Clinton off the same hook in 2016 when she claimed that she thought a \u201cC\u201d marking<\/span> on government documents referred to alphabetical order, not classification status.)<\/p>\n

Republicans were perturbed that the Biden administration did not release the transcript of Hur\u2019s five hour interview with Biden until the morning of today\u2019s hearing. Biden had falsely accused Hur of raising the issue of the death of Beau Biden, but it was the president who repeatedly mentioned it\u2014and was unaware of the year of his son\u2019s death. Biden\u2019s attention wandered during the questioning, including when he started to make childlike noises like his beloved old Corvette. No wonder the White House intervened to seek to censor the report\u2019s comments on Biden\u2019s mental capacity.<\/p>\n

Biden had at least one shining moment of candor and competence during the Hur interview: \u201cWe over-classify everything\u2026And 99.9 percent of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn\u2019t pick up and read out loud to the public.\u201d Both Biden and Trump\u2014along with Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, and busloads of other politicians as yet unnamed\u2014have been caught in a bureaucratic tar pit created to enable Washington to blindfold Americans. Biden, who previously served as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, took no personal responsibilities for the absurdities of the federal statute book. The best case outcome of both the Biden and Trump classification controversies would be a radical rollback of pointless federal secrecy.<\/p>\n

Rep. Cori Bush derided the Hur hearing as a \u201cRepublican clown show.\u201d But Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) got the last laugh when she declared that the feds have \u201cunlimited resources to go after and prosecute citizens\u2014to make an example of them. Why are <\/span>people named Clinton or Biden the only ones not held accountable for violating the law?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1954, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was censured shortly after a witness he was dogging demanded to know, \u201cHave you no sense of decency, sir?\u201d In popular mythology, McCarthy\u2019s rebuff exemplified how decency ultimate triumphs in Washington. But you only need to watch a few congressional hearings nowadays to recognize that venality continues to prevail.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Truth Has No Chance on Capitol Hill by James Bovard | Mar 25, 2024 Americans are encouraged to believe that the U.S. Congress is practically on automatic pilot to serve the public. Happily, most Americans are not so gullible and Congress receives much of the contempt it deserves in public opinion polls. But the media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2124,347,3517,15,4075,251,3767,47,4073,3610,339,294,4076,3600,2420,27,4053,3985,4077,30,2451,4074,1145],"class_list":["post-19360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biden","tag-cia","tag-classified-documents","tag-congress","tag-cori-buh","tag-crimes","tag-dan-bishop","tag-fbi","tag-garza","tag-harriet-hageman","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-hud","tag-jayapal","tag-jim-jordan","tag-joseph-mccarthy","tag-lying","tag-matt-gaetz","tag-robert-hur","tag-steve-cohen","tag-surveillance","tag-three-stooges","tag-trevor-timm","tag-venality"],"yoast_head":"\nTruth Has No Chance on Capitol Hill - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Congressional hearings have not become more honorable since the Joseph McCarthy era\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/25\/truth-has-no-chance-on-capitol-hill\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Truth Has No Chance on Capitol Hill - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19360"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19362,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19360\/revisions\/19362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}