There is a version of Tuesday\u2019s 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 \u2014 who turns 93 this week \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enjoy it and then be honest about what you watched, because the joke has two targets and conservatives keep pretending it has one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Booker earned every bit of it. This is a man with a long and well-documented relationship with the dramatic gesture \u2014 the Spartacus moment at the Kavanaugh hearings, the twenty-five-hour floor speech that wasn\u2019t a filibuster and didn\u2019t stop anything, the sit-in on the Capitol steps that drew a livestream and not much else. He did not come to Tuesday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Kash Patel didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 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\u2019t turn over to Congress, sat unexamined for another five minutes. Patel got his clip. Booker got his. The FBI got a free pass. That\u2019s not a win for oversight; it\u2019s a draw in a genre that shouldn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which brings us to Grassley, who is the actual story here and who nobody will remember by Friday. He didn\u2019t gavel Booker down because Booker is a Democrat. He gaveled him down because the man\u2019s time had expired and a committee where time limits are optional is not a committee. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The temptation for the right is to file this under \u201cDemocrat humiliated, good day.\u201d Take the better lesson instead. The reason Booker\u2019s performance reads as hollow isn\u2019t that he was loud. It\u2019s that nothing in those four and a half minutes could ever have produced a fact. And the reason Patel\u2019s comeback isn\u2019t the triumph it\u2019s being sold as is that it couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grassley has spent five decades proving that. He asked the right question on Tuesday, and it wasn\u2019t the one that went viral. It was whatever he planned to ask next, once the theater kid finally sat down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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