Horrifying, Astonishing, Reassuring, Messy

It is easy to take the low road, mocking and denigrating the sorry performance of Representative Sylvia Garcia of Texas District 29, in the vicinity of Houston.

Double click to enlarge.

It would be easy but, I think, lazy.

There are just so many fascinating elements to this six minute snippet of our legislative and Congressional processes.  

Rather than a lengthy disquisition, perhaps simply some snippet observations.

Representative Garcia seems to have virtually no awareness of technology or social media.  She appears to not know how either Twitter or Substack work.  This is the substance of the hearing but she has no comprehension.

Her staff appear not to have been involved in preparing her for the committee hearing.  Her questioning is so adrift and uninformed that you would think that they would have prepared her.  Either they did not brief her, she did not listen, or she listened and she did not understand.  

Representative Garcia's degree is in sociology and then law and her career was as a social worker and then as a judge.  Yet she appears not to practice one of the first pieces of advice to all new lawyers "Never ask a question you don't know the answer to."  

The difficulty of two people of differing capabilities or experiences is on display.  It appears that Taibbi posted his twitter thread on Twitter.  He later submitted the content of that thread as part of his testimony before the committee.  It appears that there is confusion between Taibbi and Garcia because she is not asking the right questions and he is not understanding what she doesn't know.  Garcia wants to try and argue that Taibbi colluded with Republicans on the committee and kept information from the Democrats on the committee.  Of course, for Taibbi, both parties (and the rest of the world) had simultaneous access to his thread when he originally posted it.  The extraction of the content into submitted testimony is almost irrelevant to Taibbi whereas it is crucial to Garcia, misunderstanding social media as she apparently does.

Unrelated to anything in terms of information about social media.  Representative Garcia appears to be an old white establishment woman of the Left.  She is indeed 73 years old and appears to legitimately have a Mexican American background.  But it is a striking example of the ambiguity about so much of the race identity nonsense.  Is she an old white establishment woman or a female Hispanic pioneer in public service? Or both?  Is she motivated by family or ideology?  Is she dyed in the wool American (as she appears) or does she have some divisive identity based agenda?  From appearances she is just another American upper middle class professional with a strong partisan bent.  Identity seems irrelevant.

In my childhood, the Democratic party and the ACLU were all about Free Speech and freedom of the press.  It is jarring to see a Democratic Representative appearing to insist that she and the government have a right to know the journalists sources.  Forget the legal niceties.  That is a cultural orientation which has apparently changed.  She appears fine with government control of journalists.  

I listen to her questioning of Taibbi to try and establish a timeline of who knew what when.  Fair enough.  But he is also making the point that revealing all that detail will necessitate the reveal of his sources.  Also fair enough.  It is unclear from the performance whether she simply does not understand that revealing the details means the revealing of the sources or whether she doesn't care about the revealing of sources.  

Then there is the bizarre exchange in which Representative Garcia describes Michael Shellenberger (married) and Matt Taibbi (married with children) as being in a threesome with Bari Weiss (LGBT married with children).  Garcia betrays no awareness of the double entendre while the witnesses, the committee members, and the hearing spectators are all laughing sotto voce.  Shellenberger, with the sense of a comedian rather than a journalist author, responds that there were many more people than a threesome.

But you know what?  The House of Representatives is explicitly supposed to contain a cross-section of America.  Representative Garcia's weaknesses as a cross-examiner, her ignorance of social media and technology, her slowness or her absence of humor - those are all traits of some people.

We want the House of Representatives to represent the Best and the Brightest.  We want them to lead and provide insight.  We want to be comfortable that the nation's legislation and inquiries are in safe hands.  You can't see Garcia's performance and get that feeling.  She appears ignorant, doddering, and partisan.

The House of Representatives cannot only have bright insightful people because then it would be less than representative.  Garcia's weaknesses as an individual are her strengths as part of an institution.

We want the House of Representatives to look more like America at large than to be a vanguard of the Soviet model of the Best and the Brightest.  You believe in a constitutional representative democratic republic or you don't.

If you believe in a constitutional representative democratic republic, then you have to be comfortable that there will be Representatives like Garcia and worse (Hank Johnson, Georgia's Fourth District, I am looking at you.)  We need and should want variety among the Representatives.  It may make us nervous.  Their performances might be cringe making.  We might want to laugh at some of the things they say.

But that is what it is all about.  That is what constitutional representative democratic republic involves.  And God Bless them, every last Representative.  And God Bless their ignorant, ideological, dangerous, embarrassing little souls.

UPDATE:  Matt has his own update of the experience of being grilled by people with both an agenda and little knowledge.  The Democrats Have Lost the Plot by Matt Taibbi.