The New American Bandstand
The truth behind celebrity-packed congressional hearings.
No teen idol has caused such controversy since David Cassidy posed nude for Rolling Stone. So how did Burger King pitchman and Backstreet Boy member Kevin Richardson wind up in the center of a dispute between two powerful senators?
The furor erupted last week when Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) invited the Kentucky native to testify before the Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and Wetlands. Richardson was invited to speak as an expert on mountaintop mining, a practice in which the top of a ridge or mountain is sheared off to expose a coal seam. Dirt and rock waste then is pushed into nearby valleys and waterways.
"I am not a scientist, but I know what I've seen in flights over the coal fields," Richardson said.
That wasn't enough expertise for Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), the ranking GOP member on the committee. Voinovich boycotted the former Ninja Turtle's testimony. "It's just a joke to think that this witness can provide members of the United States Senate with information on important geological and water-quality issues," he told The Washington Post.
Voinovich charged that Lieberman invited Richardson "to make a media stunt out of what is a serious issue." He added, "We're either serious about the issues or we're running a sideshow."
Well, then, Congress has been a sideshow for years. It first used Hollywood celebrities to attract the crowds back in the 1940s.
But the era of the modern celebrity committee hearing really began with "The Plight of the Family Farmer," which played the House Agriculture committee back in 1985. Sure, the committee could have gone for some unknowns in the roles of bankrupt farm wives. But they went with big stars—Sissy Spacek, Jane Fonda ,and Sally Field. They all had the big names, and they had all played farm wives before, so the committee knew they could handle the roles.
It worked. Every critic in town wanted tickets, not just beat reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the unofficial voice of the family farmer, Grit, "America's Greatest Family Newspaper." All the media were there. And there wasn't a dry eye in the House when Fonda told of how her father led his family out of the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma during the Great Depression.
Lately, Congress has had more special guest stars than a Love Boat reunion special: Elmo, Julia Roberts, Christie Brinkley, Michael J. Fox, Muhammad Ali, Alanis Morissette, and Don Henley. I keep expecting Barbi Benton to show up.
And why not? Congressional hearings aren't held to gather facts or to educate senators about an issue. Their long-term goal may be to build support for some piece of legislation or to bolster someone's career. But the short-term purpose is always to get lawmakers' names in the headlines, and even better, to get their faces on TV.
No less than a half-dozen congressional committees recently held hearings on the collapse on Enron. Lawmakers did just fine when they were denouncing the evil men who ran that company. But they didn't find any smoking guns. If anything, the public, and Congress, seemed more confused after the hearings than before. But that was OK. The real problem from Congress' point of view is that those hearings failed to earn them much attention.
Congressional hearings are theater and the cast of characters is as carefully put together as any Lou Pearlman-created group. Congress casts itself as the cruel but fair gunslinger trying to clean up a lawless town. They stand up for the little guy, condemn evildoers, and kick sand in the face of bullies.
Sometimes their adversaries are the bureaucrats who dare to enforce the laws Congress itself has written. Every few years, for instance, Congress rakes the IRS over the coals for trying to keep people from avoiding the punitive taxes needed to finance the latest West Virginia monument to Sen. Robert Byrd.
More often, those bureaucrats play the role of loyal sidekick to our heroes, just wanting to help them make the world right.
A Heritage Foundation study in the mid-1990s found that over half of all witnesses testifying before Congress got money from the federal government. About a third of all witnesses were federal employees. And more than one in five represented an organization that got money directly from the government.
Predictably, most of those witnesses called for more federal spending and more government involvement in the economy. That's what they are there for. They've been cast as the earnest advocates, and that's the role they will play.
Congress has its pick of bit players to play the downtrodden townspeople: Smokers who never realized a lifetime of inhaling noxious chemicals was bad for them, farmers who can't make it on their federal subsidies, Enron employees who ignored basic financial advice and sank their life savings into their company's stock.
But let's say you are a producer–er–I mean a committee chairman. Your next show could be the difference between making it to Broadway or continuing to play dinner theater in Poughkeepsie. You know that on any given week day, there are dozens of other shows playing all over the place. How do you pull the audience into your show? Star power! That's why celebrities get invited.
Joe Lieberman looked at the C-Span 2 ratings and saw the Senate's audience skews even older than that of Touched by an Angel. When he cast Kevin Richardson in his hearing, he was just trying to pick up some of that vaunted 12 to 22-year-old female demographic. It goes without saying that Backstreet Boys' concerts and congressional hearings are both about image and flash, not substance. (Though it should be pointed out that Richardson and his bandmates have better choreography.)
Sen. Voinovich can boycott hearings, and the punditti can complain. But celebrity-packed hearings are here to stay.
Well, until someone invites Ted McGinley to speak.
