{"id":11382,"date":"2013-04-23T11:56:16","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T15:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11382"},"modified":"2013-04-23T11:56:16","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T15:56:16","slug":"something-better-than-a-congressional-hearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11382","title":{"rendered":"something better than a congressional hearing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Hesson’s story on ABC News\/Univision is headlined “Why Congressional Hearings Aren’t Worth Your Time<\/a>.” It begins, “There’s a major immigration reform hearing in the Senate today. Don’t bother watching it. The general point of holding these hearings is so that members of Congress can debate a bill and let the public know what’s going on. This hearing won’t do either very well, according to Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, a Massachusetts-based organization that looks at civic engagement among young people.”<\/p>\n

I am the only person quoted in the piece, but the headline and message (“don’t bother watching”) are stronger than my own views. Hesson quotes these words later on: “I’d be loath to say [a hearing] is of no value,” Levine said. “We want people to follow these important issues, and it’s one way to do so. But it’s not the greatest.”<\/p>\n

In fact, I recognize that hearings have many purposes, including generating a legal record. I also acknowledge–and Hesson quotes me saying–that ordinary, low-profile hearings inform Members of Congress and help them refine their views. “But as a hearing grows in stature, it often turns into political theater. ‘When something is very high profile, they switch into entertainment mode,’ Levine said.”<\/p>\n

I liked Hesson’s provocative piece, but these would be my own main points (on sober reflection):<\/p>\n

1. Congressional hearings have several purposes, two of which are educating the public about the issue in question and letting us observe our representatives’ interactions. For those two purposes, high-profile hearings are not particularly helpful. They are examples of instrumental action<\/a> (trying to score points) rather than real communication. I am a policy wonk interested in immigration, but I would never take the time to watch the immigration hearings. That is partly because …<\/p>\n

2. High-quality journalism still plays an essential role in explaining issues and controversies. A reliable and skillful journalist can watch the hearings and pull out the salient exchanges. She will also read the bill, talk to staffers off the record, and generally tell a more complete picture. The supposedly unmediated access to the hearing that I could get from C-SPAN does not strike me as particularly useful; I want mediation.\u00a0 I am glad that we have a right<\/em> to see the whole event, because someone may make useful sense of it. I would not expect most people–even exemplary citizens–to watch it themselves.<\/p>\n

3. Hesson quoted Madison (“the mild voice of reason”) at my suggestion. The Madisonian ideal is that our representatives should deliberate: listening, learning, and changing their views. Our culture does not reward that, generally ignoring nuance and treating changes of opinion as “flip-flopping.” I think the underlying reasons include bad news coverage, bad formats for official discussions, and–especially–a lack of civic engagement in the citizenry as a whole. The late, great Elinor Ostrom noted that the proportion of citizens who served on school boards fell by 95% between 1932 and 1982. That was just one example of diminished engagement. If we don’t have experience deliberating, how will we detect and reward it in Congress?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ted Hesson’s story on ABC News\/Univision is headlined “Why Congressional Hearings Aren’t Worth Your Time.” It begins, “There’s a major immigration reform hearing in the Senate today. Don’t bother watching it. The general point of holding these hearings is so that members of Congress can debate a bill and let the public know what’s going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deliberation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11382"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11400,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11382\/revisions\/11400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}