On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to question one of the most powerful people on the planet---Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company that filters all the world's information. And they blew it.

Over the course of three and a half hours, the members of the committee staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle over whether Google search and other products are biased against conservatives. Republican members largely criticized the company for burying conservative websites in search results and amplifying criticism of conservative policies—accusations that Google has repeatedly denied. Democrats only poured fuel on the fire by spending their allotted five minutes helping Pichai shoot down those trumped-up claims, which are hard to prove either way thanks to the company's black box algorithms. The rhetorical tennis match left precious little time for committee members to explore in any detail the urgent questions around Google's interest in building a censored search engine for China, the company's bulk data collection practices, its recent security breaches, or issues related to competition and antitrust regulation.

Like earlier House hearings with tech leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the day proved heavy on theatrics and light on substance---complete with audience appearances by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Roger Stone, the conservative provocateur who now finds himself at the center of the Russia probe.

The hearing was more than a missed opportunity for both lawmakers and members of the public. It was a foreboding reminder of Congress's continued technological ignorance, and a sign that while lawmakers almost unilaterally agree that something must be done about tech giants' tremendous power, they remain unwilling to set aside partisan squabbles to actually do anything about it.

Pichai began his testimony by insisting that he leads Google "without political bias."

"We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions—and we have no shortage of them among our own employees," the soft-spoken CEO said in his opening remarks.

But that didn't stop lawmakers from bombarding him with anecdotes that suggested otherwise. Why is it, wondered Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), that when he Googled the Republicans' proposed healthcare bill in 2017, only negative stories popped up? Rep. Steve King (R-IA) asked Pichai why his granddaughter saw negative news about him on her iPhone. When Pichai informed him that Google doesn't make iPhones, King offered lamely, "It might have been an Android." Meanwhile, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) cited a report by PJ Media that claims 96 percent of search results for President Trump are from liberal media sites, a stat that has previously been debunked.

As Republicans leveled baseless accusations against Pichai, though, some Democrats squandered their time defending Google, a corporate juggernaut that is more than deserving of deep examination. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California lobbed a softball at Pichai, asking him to walk through how search works. Pichai explained that Google's algorithms crawl the web for keywords and rank pages based on more than 200 signals including relevancy, freshness, and popularity. “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?" Lofgren replied, perhaps sarcastically, but certainly not helpfully.

Later, Rep. Ted Lieu, also of California, carried all the weight for Pichai with a stunt that compared search results for Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) to results for Rep. King. He found that the results for Scalise mostly turned up stories about his book, while results for King mostly called him a bigot. "If you want positive search results, do positive things," Lieu warned his colleagues, reserving almost no scrutiny for the man actually seated in the witness chair.