There is a version of Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing that makes for a good afternoon on X. Cory Booker builds toward one of his crescendos, runs past his time, keeps going, and Chuck Grassley — who turns 93 this week — finally asks whether the senator from New Jersey is ready to shut up. The clip is funny. It will be in a campaign ad within the month, probably two of them, aimed in opposite directions.
Enjoy it and then be honest about what you watched, because the joke has two targets and conservatives keep pretending it has one.
Booker earned every bit of it. This is a man with a long and well-documented relationship with the dramatic gesture — the Spartacus moment at the Kavanaugh hearings, the twenty-five-hour floor speech that wasn’t a filibuster and didn’t stop anything, the sit-in on the Capitol steps that drew a livestream and not much else. He did not come to Tuesday’s hearing to learn anything about the FBI. He came with a monologue, delivered the monologue, and then declined to stop delivering it when the light turned red. Calling the director a mockery was the applause line. That was the whole appointment.
But Kash Patel didn’t come to answer questions either. He came loaded, and he fired back that Booker is the biggest mockery in the Senate and threw in a shot at the senator sitting beside him for good measure. Conservatives cheered. I understand why — after a decade of Bureau leadership treating congressional Republicans with open contempt, a director who hits back is a novelty. But look at what the exchange actually produced. Two men trading insults about which of them is the bigger embarrassment, while an agency with unresolved questions about Butler, about its hiring standards, about what it did and didn’t turn over to Congress, sat unexamined for another five minutes. Patel got his clip. Booker got his. The FBI got a free pass. That’s not a win for oversight; it’s a draw in a genre that shouldn’t exist.
Which brings us to Grassley, who is the actual story here and who nobody will remember by Friday. He didn’t gavel Booker down because Booker is a Democrat. He gaveled him down because the man’s time had expired and a committee where time limits are optional is not a committee. That’s the unglamorous function the whole apparatus depends on: someone at the front of the room who enforces the rules the same way regardless of which side is running long.
Grassley has been doing that job, and grinding out records requests that nobody else bothers with, since before most of the people in that room were in law school. He is also the senator currently prying loose FBI documents on Butler that the Bureau had no intention of volunteering. The contrast is the column. One man treats a hearing as a stage; another treats it as a procedure that produces information.
The temptation for the right is to file this under “Democrat humiliated, good day.” Take the better lesson instead. The reason Booker’s performance reads as hollow isn’t that he was loud. It’s that nothing in those four and a half minutes could ever have produced a fact. And the reason Patel’s comeback isn’t the triumph it’s being sold as is that it couldn’t have either. A Republican senator on that dais with a document in his hand and a specific question about it would have done more damage to a hostile narrative than every viral moment of that hearing combined.
Grassley has spent five decades proving that. He asked the right question on Tuesday, and it wasn’t the one that went viral. It was whatever he planned to ask next, once the theater kid finally sat down.
