Does anyone remember what contempt of Congress used to mean, back when the phrase carried the faint metallic taste of consequence? I ask because the House Oversight Committee voted on a Sunday — a Sunday, while the rest of the country was watching tennis or shoveling out a driveway — to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt, and the only person at my table who looked up from his plate was the bipartisan lobbyist, and only because the bread had arrived.
I was at Eliza’s. She had done the lamb again. She always does the lamb when the news is bad, which has become a kind of seasonal calendar in Georgetown, more reliable than the weather. Outside, the storm that had buried Connecticut on Saturday was still pawing at the windows. Inside, six people who collectively know where every body in this town is buried were discussing whether the Australian Open final had been the better men’s match of the decade.
I waited. I am, by temperament and by trade, a waiter. Eventually I said: the Clintons. Contempt. Sunday. And Eliza, who is the most decent person I know and the most exhausted, said, “Margaret, please. Not at the lamb.”
The bipartisan lobbyist — I will not name him, but he has worked for everyone you can think of and three people you cannot — examined his cufflink. He said the vote was “procedural.” He said this the way a man says the check is in the mail. He said it had been “telegraphed for weeks,” which is what people in this town say when they want you to understand that something outrageous has been pre-laundered into something boring, and that you, by being surprised, are the one with the manners problem.
I want to be careful here, because I have spent thirty years writing this column and I know the trap. The trap is to defend the Clintons, whom I have criticized in print more times than I can count and will criticize again before Lent. That is not the column. The column is the word. Contempt. We used to reserve it for mob bosses who refused to testify and tobacco executives who lied about nicotine. We used it sparingly because we understood that a word used on everything ends up meaning nothing, which is, I suppose, the point.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than the current chairman has been shaving, called me Sunday night. Judy does not editorialize. Judy reads call slips for a living. She said the committee’s underlying request had been filed, withdrawn, refiled under a different number, and then attached to a referral about something else entirely, which is the legislative equivalent of returning a sweater you never bought. She said, and I am quoting her, “They’re not trying to get anything. They’re trying to have voted.”
Have voted. Past tense, performative. The vote is the product. The vote is the clip. The vote is the fundraising email that will go out Monday morning with a red banner and a countdown clock. Whether anyone is ever actually held in contempt of anything is a question for a court that will hear it in 2029, by which point the chairman will be on cable, the ranking member will be on a different cable, and the Clintons will be wherever the Clintons are, which is, increasingly, the answer to a trivia question.
Eliza brought out the dessert. The lobbyist asked, very gently, whether I had seen what the Russians were doing in Tbilisi. He asked this the way one asks a friend whether she has considered switching to decaf. The subject was being changed. The subject is always being changed. We are a country that has gotten extraordinarily good at changing the subject in the middle of our own sentences.
I went home. I sat at my kitchen table with the cable on mute and watched the chyron cycle through the words BILL, HILLARY, CONTEMPT, BREAKING. I thought about Judy’s phrase. To have voted. I thought about what it costs a republic to spend its serious words on unserious afternoons, and what is left in the drawer when you need them.
The lamb, for what it’s worth, was very good. Eliza used rosemary from her own pot, the one she keeps on the sill above the sink. We talked about that for a while. It was the only thing at the table all night that anyone said was actually true.