General Comments on the January 6 Committee Hearings: Should We Miss the Republicans?

So, as we watch the Select Committee hearings, a certain haunting questions won't go away.  Should there be Republican nominees?  

Just by way of quick reminder, Republicans rejected forming a blue ribbon commission to study the insurrection, so the House voted for a 13 member committee with eight members to be chosen by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and five by Republican leader Kevin McCarthy.  Pelosi then chose seven Democrats, including both impeachment managers, and Liz Cheney.  McCarthy chose five Republicans, including Jim Jordan.  Pelosi then rejected both Jordan and Jim Banks as inimical the the committee's mission.  McCarthy then withdrew all his nominees, so Pelosi appointed Adam Kinzinger as the only other Republican willing to serve.

The result has been -- unusual.  Committee hearing do not follow the same rules of evidence as a  trial, but traditionally they have been an adversarial process, with partisan divisions and aggressive cross-examination of witnesses by the minority party.  (Jim Jordan is particularly notorious in this regard).  Committee hearings also tend to involve into preening and posturing, with each committee member asking the witness many of the same questions and being more focused on showing off than eliciting information. 

Without those things, the hearings really do seem sometimes not to be "real" committee hearings, with a proper adversarial process, but something more staged and predetermined.  Opponents refers to the hearings as a show trial.  I think it would be more accurate to call them a documentary.  On the one hand, what's wrong with that?  Good documentaries can be informative.  This is certainly a good documentary.  But documentaries do not leave a lot of room for spontaneity, or opposing views.  

And so, yes, I saw the committee show a selection of videotaped testimony and wondered if it was deceptively edited.  Of course, the entirety of their deposition testimony would have gone on for hours and hours and much of it was presumably deathly dull.  And, yes, I can absolutely imagine that Republicans would insist on showing witness testimony in its entirety precisely to bore to audience into tuning them out. Still, the Democrats would have had a majority of 8-5 or at least 7-6 (depending on which way Liz Cheney wanted to go) and should have been able to make some reasonable rules, allowing each party to submit the parts of videotaped depositions it considered genuinely relevant, but not long portions intended solely to confuse and bore.

Even live testimony, if brief, felt staged. Longer testimony had more give and take, more spontaneity, more feeling of reality. But not the real genuineness and spontaneity that goes with hostile cross-examination in an adversarial process.  At the same time, "real" hearings can degenerate into round-robins of each committee member asking the same question, speechifying, preening, and posturing.  The January 6 Committee avoided this problem by having only one or two members ask questions at each hearing.  They could have set the same rule for Republicans -- only one member is allowed to cross examine per hearing.  The Democrats took care to give each member a chance to shine, but by all means, let the Republicans decide who to put forward.  Whether they wanted to have a difference member cross-examine each time, or to have Jim Jordan ranting and raging each time should be entirely up to them.

There is only one problem here.  It presumes that the Republicans are good faith actors with good faith disagreements.  It presumes that Republicans are prepared to concede the committee some degree of legitimacy and do not want to destroy it altogether.  The evidence rather suggests otherwise.  Others have pointed out that Republicans' opportunities to undermine, obstruct, selectively leak, and even pass information on to Trump and his inner circle, would probably have completely sabotaged the Committee.

In other words, good faith Republicans could have contributed to the Committee's mission to get to the bottom of things by challenging them and forcing them to prove everything.  Bad faith Republicans could (probably) have sabotaged the committee and made it unworkable.  And given the choice between that and a committee that seems just a little too slick, too scripted, and too much like a documentary instead of a committee -- well, I think what we have now is very much the better choice.