Naming Names - the Public Michael Cohen Hearing

A lot happened when Michael Cohen appeared before the House Oversight Committee, so much that something might have been overlooked.  The media have dissected the stuff that sells papers, but there was something that plucked a certain civic string that hasn't been plucked in almost seventy years. The press ignored it, perhaps because ignoring it butters their bread.  But I am oddly and gnawingly discomfited by it.

I'm talking about Cohen naming the names of Trump's henchmen.  The prosecutors with whom Cohen is cooperating have all the names.  Congress could certainly get them in a list provided privately.  Why, then, did the Democrats - you know, the ones who railed about Comey saying bad things about someone he did not think should be indicted - feel so free to have some more names of people who may or may not eventually be indicted, disclosed publicly?  Wouldn't "Can you give us a list of people who have evidence of Trump's skulduggery?" have sufficed? Did these people's children have to hear their Dads' names on TV? Do these people deserve to be hounded by reporters on Michael Cohen's say-so?

Our pols do not seem to recognize the difference between a precedent and a one-off.  Consider the filibustering of judges. Mitch McConnell - a truly dreadful human being, but I digress, sort of - used the filibuster to prevent confirmation of qualified judges rightfully appointed by President Obama.  That was subversive and inexcusable.  Harry Reid's "nuclear" response to McConnell, dispensing with the filibuster for appointments other than SCOTUS justices, was unanimously opposed by Republicans. Allegedly, they thought it was a bad idea.  Yet, when they got control of the Senate, they did not undo it.  Reid's rule change came back to bite the Dems in the butt, and, good government being always the farthest thing from Mitch McConnell's mind, the Republicans have kept Reid's rule in place. Apparently, it, and they, have mellowed with age.

So, a one-off response to an unprecedented GOP abuse of the filibuster became a precedent rather than a caution.  The same thing is happening with the President's border wall "emergency."  The Democrats simultaneously rant about how the President has no power to do what he is doing while wetting their pants over the possibility that their President will get to do the same thing with guns and opioids and climate change.  Given what they see as a good chance of winning the White House eventually, the ideologues on both sides of the Congress are eager to take Congress out of the President's way when he's on their side.  This ridiculous, unconstitutional fraud is all too likely to become a precedent, because the members of a feckless Congress would rather abdicate their responsibilities than perform them.

But back to Cohen.  There was a difference between the HUAC and McCarthy hearings, on the one hand, and the Trump hearings today. The substantive issues today are not political.  The people that Cohen named are not accused of subversion or disloyalty, just maybe covering up venality. How is it that the naming of possible traitors is now seen, rightly, as loathsome, whereas the naming of cogs in the Trump money machine is applauded as a "road map" for Congress? Still, the theatricality of public naming was the same. Here's a piece from Chapter 10 of Victor Navasky's Naming Names:

The testimony of Kimple, Silver, and Erwin, combined with intelligence from the FBI and countless other government sources ... meant that the last thing the Committee needed to do its job was to accumulate more names. Moreover, almost all the witnesses who named names publicly preceded their public testimony with a private, executive-session rehearsal, which means that the public hearings were indeed largely ceremonial. ... Names were turned on and off like water by the Committee's counsel and investigator, depending on the symbolic goal of the day. 

And of course, named names get published with alacrity.  What else can one expect of the commercial media? That they should give a fig about the private consequence of public gossip?  They don't have enough evidence to name these people themselves as miscreants, but they sure as hell have absolutely incontrovertible evidence that Michael Cohen says they are involved in shady dealings. The things said by Michael Cohen may not be true, but his saying them is news.  If those things are names of people with real lives, reputations, and families put at risk, all the better. "Run that tape again!  We don't ever get names.  This is unprecedented!" Yeah, because it's such a fucking awful thing to do.  But it's not unprecedented now.  Just like getting rid of the filibuster for judges, it's a bad idea, a one-off, a desperate measure for desperate times, and maybe not even appropriate then. Reid's (reversible but not reversed) nuclear option was right, the other firsts regrettable.)

Sadly, the whole Trump Presidency is a one-off, occasioned, I believe, by the GOP's sabotage of the an unready President. The question is whether we will learn from it not the President can do, but what the electorate must not do.

Update:  Here we are one day later, and Sen Durbin is on CNN being asked, in connection with possible disclosure of the Mueller Report, to comment on Rod Rosenstein's argument that the DOJ has no business saying anything publicly about any citizen against whom it cannot make a solid criminal case. That, of course, was the Democrats' view of Comey's sin, and the reason for their objection to the DOJ handing over its Hillary files to Congress. Yet, Durbin has no problem saying that "the precedent has been set" for not respecting Rosenstein's corrective advice, as if bad behavior is somehow locked in place by some invisible ratchet.  Literally, words fail me here, so I'll stop.