Dear Republican Members of Congress:
Consider this an intervention. You guys do not understand how to hold a decent hearing. Hillary Clinton danced away from your Benghazi questions like Muhammad Ali. Your threats to hold more hearings on Planned Parenthood and Benghazi are about as frightening as President Obama’s warnings to Vladimir Putin that “doubling down on Assad would be a mistake.” Putin’s Russia, once described by Sen. John McCain as a “gas station pretending to be a country,” is now running circles around Obama — rushing to fill the power void left by American abdication in the Middle East.
Speaking of running circles, that’s pretty much what Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards managed to do at the much-heralded hearing this week. The committee’s chairman announced that the devastating videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress would not be shown during the hearing due to a court order in California. So, instead of the topic of the hour — truly heart-rending footage of aborted babies being picked over for their livers and hearts, to cite just one example — the hearing featured charts showing how much money Planned Parenthood spent on various services over the past year. Riveting.
The videos are the reason the hearing was held at all. It is the videos that have galvanized abortion opponents, moved the debate and put pressure on Congress to once again attempt to defund the organization. If, due to legal wrangling, the videos cannot be shown now, then why not hold off the hearings until they can be shown? The videos are the story.
While Richards spouted platitudes and evasions, a congressman from Arizona tried to say that Planned Parenthood focuses on abortions because it’s profitable for them, but he filled his statement with jargon like “unit price” and “profit center” and “narrow focus,” and one doubts the point got across. Meanwhile, Richards spoke of cancer screenings and contraceptives and preventing STDs.
Other Republican members, determined to use their five minutes to get five seconds on the evening news or a viral video on Facebook, behaved like talk-radio hosts — interrupting the witness, shouting, and demanding yes or no answers. This is not good government. It isn’t even good theater. You look like bullies.
Individual members should relinquish — or at least radically scale back — their role in questioning witnesses. A solid investigative technique is to let a lawyer ask most of the questions. A keen lawyer doesn’t showboat or bellow.
Look, you landed a couple of punches; I won’t deny it. It’s now on the record that Richards earns nearly $600,000 per year, another in the long list of nonprofit chiefs who make tidy sums.
But there were so many questions you could have asked. Richards kept saying that donating “tissue” is one of the “services” PP performs for its patients. How is that a service for the woman? Does she share in the money, or does she get the psychic benefit of “finding cures” while PP gets the cash?
You might have asked her whether patients ever request funerals or burials for their fully formed fetuses. You might have asked whether anyone weeps at the clinics she oversees — and if so, why?
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