It was a weird day Wednesday in the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal attorney, called his old boss a "racist," a "conman" and a "cheat." Cohen himself came in for some rough treatment from Republicans on the committee, who spent the day characterizing the attorney as a "pathological liar," and a "patsy" — and even pulled out an old children's rhyme to complete the disparagement. Rough stuff, but also unsurprising: Politics ain't beanbag, after all.
Then, toward the end of the day, the hearing nearly fell apart.
Why? Well, because Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) got his feelings hurt.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Early in the hearing, Meadows decided to fight Cohen's allegations of presidential racism by presenting Lynn Patton, an African-American woman who has campaigned for Trump and currently serves in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was not asked to give her own testimony about Trump's character — instead, she stood by silently as Meadows offered her employment status as proof of Trump's racial rectitude.
"She says that as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Alabama, that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was racist," Meadows said.
Democrats on the committee were not having it — and rookie Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) was most pointed in her criticism.
"The fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber in this committee is alone racist in itself," she said.
Meadows, visibly angry, demanded that Tlaib's comment be stricken from the committee record. "The rules are clear!" he said. Tlaib soon backed down and even apologized — explaining that she was calling the action racist, not Meadows himself — and the hearing moved on.
It was a bad moment in a slog of a day.
The congressman was right about one thing: The rules are clear — broadly speaking, members of Congress are not to disparage each other or impugn each other's motives during a debate. That sounds like a good guide — insults and arguments about motivation usually make our political dialogue less productive — but the exchange between Meadows and Tlaib shows why the mandate is flawed.
For one thing: It's hypocritical — as already noted, Wednesday's hearing was a parade of impugnment and motive-questioning. More than one Republican suggested that Cohen's testimony was inspired by a desire to get a lucrative book deal. And they weren't wrong to question his credibility — Cohen, after all, is going to go to prison for lying to Congress during an earlier hearing. But the result of the rule appears to be that the only people who can't be smeared and insulted during a congressional hearing are the members of Congress. Everybody else is fair game.
The other problem is that the rule can be used to silence legitimate criticism: Tlaib was right — Meadows' decision to put Patton on display, instead of bringing her before the committee to give her testimony, was problematic to say the least. Yet it was Tlaib who ended up apologizing. That's troubling.
We've seen this kind of thing happen in Congress before, with similarly vexing results. It has been two years since Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was silenced during the debate over confirming Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Her crime: Reading a letter in which the late Coretta Scott King had criticized Sessions' commitment to civil rights. Sessions, an Alabama Republican, was still a senator at the time, and thus under the rules was owed some immunity from such direct criticism.
"Nevertheless, she persisted" became a popular rallying cry for feminists, and Warren's criticism of Sessions turned out to be entirely prescient. But in the moment that mattered — when Sessions' future, and the future of civil rights enforcement, was being decided — such frankness violated Senate rules. That is wrong.
Now: It would not hurt any of us to become a little bit more civil in our political debates. Facebook and Twitter would be happier places, at the very least. And nobody wants Congress to become a free-for-all — there's no need to return to the bad old days when one elected official could beat another one nearly to death.
As Wednesday's incident shows, however, the requirement for congressional decorum can inhibit candor among members precisely in moments when it is needed most. Capitol Hill is where America's arguments are often resolved — the rules should encourage robust debate instead of silencing critical voices.
