At a normal congressional oversight hearing, the person testifying at least answers a decent number of the questions asked by members of Congress from the opposing party. Not Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Bondi spent her time talking over Democratic senators, leveling personal attacks at them, and refusing to provide basic factual information. With Republicans, in contrast, she was smooth and solicitous. She expressed her fealty to Donald Trump, calling him “the most transparent president in American history” and saying that she’d “loved” seeing a photo of herself having dinner with the president. The almost-five-hour hearing was a portrait of an attorney general as the president’s loyalist rather than as a constitutional officer with the appropriate respect for a coordinate branch of government.
The problems began almost right away, when Ranking Member Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, asked Bondi whether the White House had consulted the Justice Department before deploying National Guard troops to American cities. “I am not going to discuss internal conversations with the White House,” Bondi informed him. Then she declared, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate the president.”
Bondi returned to this tactic repeatedly over the course of the hearing, sometimes in almost exactly the same words. She also told Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, that she wished he loved his home state of California “as much as you hate President Trump.” (This was in response to a question from Padilla about whether government officials are obligated to follow court orders.) She accused Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island of “trying to slander President Trump left and right.” (Whitehouse had asked whether the FBI had discovered photographs of Trump with young women while searching Jeffrey Epstein’s property.) She told Senator Adam Schiff of California, “If you worked for me, you would have been fired.” (Schiff had wanted to know whether Trump’s immigration adviser, Tom Homan, had accepted $50,000 in the course of an FBI sting operation, as multiple news outlets had reported.) She also refused to answer questions on whether career prosecutors had recommended against indicting FBI Director James Comey, what legal theory justified the administration’s recent military strikes on boats in the Caribbean, and why the Justice Department had fired scores of civil servants.
“This is supposed to be an oversight hearing,” Schiff said at one point. “Oversight!” Bondi scoffed, leaning back in mock disbelief, her mouth pulled into a smirk.
The next senator up was Katie Britt of Alabama, a Republican, who asked Bondi about how the Justice Department is working to “keep our kids safe” from online predators and social media. Britt’s questions were typical of Republicans on the panel: complimentary, nonconfrontational, and pitched to make Bondi and the Republican Party look good. Bondi responded to Britt with a pantomime of gratitude. “This, I believe, is what an oversight hearing should be about,” she declared.
This is not what oversight is about. The goal of oversight hearings is to provide the legislature, a branch of government equal in authority to the executive, with an opportunity to hold a presidential administration responsible for disasters, shortcomings, and breaches. The point is not to puff up the executive’s ego; it’s to help inform Congress as it considers whether and how to draft legislation, as is its constitutional responsibility. Oversight is often messy, absurd, and heavily choreographed, but accountability and information-gathering are the aims that Congress is meant to reach toward. “A legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information,” the Supreme Court held in 1927. Today, however, Republicans in Congress have little interest in legislating, so they are not in need of many facts. They’re happy to yield before the Trump administration rather than challenging it.
Bondi was disdainful of the committee, flattering it only when it allowed her to demonstrate her loyalty to the president. Her performance encapsulated Trump’s understanding of the relationship between Congress and the presidency. The legislature, in this vision, is subordinate. Pam Bondi certainly treated it that way.
