What is the word for an oversight hearing scheduled three months after the thing it is overseeing? I am asking because at dinner Sunday nobody at the table could come up with one, and I have known these people for twenty years.
We were at Eliza’s, the small kitchen, eight at the table, the lamb she has been making since the second Bush administration. The bipartisan lobbyist — I will not say his name, because he has cultivated a kind of structural invisibility that is itself a career — was examining the underside of his cufflink when the Hegseth hearing came up. He did not look up. “Tuesday,” he said, the way you would say “drizzle.”
Eliza, who reads four newspapers and remembers them, said the strikes started in September. The first boat went down before Labor Day weekend was over. The sixth was somewhere around the time the rest of us were arguing about whether to put up the wreath. And now, on the second of December, with the holiday lights already strung along Wisconsin Avenue, a committee will sit down to ask Pete Hegseth whether he had the authority to do the things he has finished doing.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have opinions about humidity, said the most depressing word in Washington is “belatedly.” She said it twice, because nobody picked it up the first time. The lobbyist gave a small, courteous laugh, the kind he uses on both sides of the aisle and has trademarked.
Here is what Tuesday will produce. There will be opening statements, in which several senators thank Mr. Hegseth for his service while explaining that they have grave concerns. Mr. Hegseth will say he cannot discuss operational details in an open setting. Three senators will pivot to questions about morale. One will hold up a chart. The chart will be visible only to the camera. By six o’clock everyone will have a clip for the home district, and the boats — those particular boats, with those particular men on them — will continue to be the boats they were on the morning of the strike, which is to say, gone.
I asked the lobbyist, because I cannot help myself, what he thought the hearing was for. He said it was for the record. He said it the way a sommelier says “Burgundy,” with the confidence of a man who has been paid to know.
Eliza, sensing the air, asked who wanted more wine. Judy took more wine. The lobbyist took more wine. I took more wine. We have all become very good at the small civic service of keeping the conversation moving past the part where someone might have to say something they would have to defend later.
I want to be careful here, because I have been writing this column long enough to know that the worst thing a columnist can do is finish the reader’s sentence for her. So I will only point out the sequence. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Hearing. Lamb. Recipe.
Somebody at the table — I think it was Judy, but it might have been me — said the country used to do this differently, and the lobbyist, finally looking up from the cufflink, said the country used to do a lot of things differently, and that was the line that ended the political portion of the evening. After that we talked about a chef in Mount Pleasant who has reopened under a new name, and whether the new name is better than the old name, and whether the room is too loud now.
The room, for the record, is too loud now. Tuesday’s hearing will be quieter. There will be a transcript. There will be, somewhere in Judy’s building, eventually, a folder. A senator will issue a statement calling the answers insufficient and vowing to follow up, and we will all understand what “follow up” means in a town that scheduled this hearing in December.
We had the lamb. We asked Eliza for the recipe. She said it was the same recipe.