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The Democrats don’t have a stellar recent record of conducting congressional hearings.

They couldn’t figure out how to respond effectively to Brett Kavanaugh’s righteous anger or to ask some of the probing follow-up questions that his testimony raised. Democrats also struggled this year to turn hearings on the Russia scandal into the kind of compelling television that would move public opinion.

What’s the problem? Many members of Congress (in both parties) don’t understand how to conduct a hearing in a way that changes perceptions. They grandstand or give long soliloquies. In the case of the current Democratic Party, it doesn’t help that some of the highest-profile committee members, in both the House and Senate, are in their 70s or 80s and are no longer as sharp as they once were.

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