clarification. These words tend to be read not as words but as clear descriptors of bona fide actions that correspond exactly to what is named—scrutinizing, clarifying, ordering, establishing causal links between various points of a perspective. Typically, the realist strategy is not read as a strategy but as the means for conveying and activating a rational process that makes it possible to obtain the objective overview the critical thinker is expected to take.
The practices that appear to actualize rational procedures of deliberation draw upon the same scopic paradigm (see Martin Jay) that invokes a metaphor of vision to depict political judgment as an act of critical scrutiny. Impeachment advocates were able to summon this paradigm because it is a familiar one with a long and venerable history that, according to Davide Panagia, extends from the writings of Thomas Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham to the contemporary theories of Jürgen Habermas, whose ethic of communication calls for open debate that enables interlocutors to mutually recognize and validate the most reasonable premise. The organizing logic conflates democratic practices with public scrutiny and affirms the validity of the mimetic act of “presencing” while rendering its reception as tantamount to deliberation’s very character. Once this narrative depiction is referenced as a real descriptor of deliberatory practices, then it will seem both logical and ethical to expect that language users should put forth acts of representation that facilitate a straight forward review.
But rather than prove that the language of empiricism is available to buttress deliberatory processes, the October meetings demonstrated that proclaiming a desire for representational order will not necessarily instigate it. Disagreements arose about every aspect of the inquiry in ways that implicated the role of narrative in establishing visions of what actually constitutes critical scrutiny. When Republican members effectively said, “yes, let’s look at this,” Democrats responded, “at what?” and “for how long?” As summed up by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): “The chairman said we shouldn’t look away, we should look further. I agree. What we shouldn’t do, however, is adopt a resolution that says, ‘let’s look around. Let’s see what we can find.’”15
Democrats who did not want to pursue an inquiry at all—those who felt that the calls for impeachment were a charade—raised objections to Republican methods of obtaining and processing evidence. They posed questions that, initially, seemed to be straightforwardly procedural: How much time to devote to deliberation? What evidence should be examined to insure that a look at facts took precedence over innuendo? But even these seemingly simple questions encountered the problem of translation that accompanies the endeavor to distinguish style from substance. Rather than generate an unassailable linkage between a narrative describing an ideal inquiry and an actualization of that ideal, the October debates about whether to even consider the option of impeachment revealed a fundamental inability to demonstrate that words connect to practices in ways that would enable the spectator to ascertain differences between the fake and the true. How, for example, to represent and bring to full presence the intangible and fluid experience of deliberating? What to do to insure that legislators were truly engaged in the labor of thinking and not delivering preformed stylized performances?
When, for example, Hyde opened the meeting of the House and mentioned that thousands of pages from investigating attorneys had been made available for review, he suggested that the pages themselves should be regarded as an unprejudiced object of scrutiny. But many had doubts about the impartiality of that evidence and what it represented. The objectivity of the Special Prosecutor who collected “the facts” was also rendered suspicious, and that sense implicated feelings about whether a straightforward look at the evidence would instigate an unbiased review. Further, the question about how much time to give to debate posed a secondary question of whether we can know, for sure, whose look has been critically engaged rather than cursory—the mere show that aimed to validate a foregone conclusion. How to tell the difference between the look that would truly deliberate from that which only appeared to do so?
The suspicions of Democratic congressional leaders about the legitimacy of the inquiry were articulated by U.S. Rep William Delahunt (D-MA), who, at the House debate about the impeachment inquiry, objected to the restrictions being placed upon the kind of deliberation that was to take place:
I’m aware of the fact that there is a limited time for this debate. I think that is indeed unfortunate, because I was going on to talk about how we have abdicated our constitutional duties to an unelected prosecutor; how we have released thousands of pages that none of us in good conscience can say that we’ve read; how we’ve violated the sanctity of the grand jury so that we can arrive here today to launch an inquiry without an independent adequate review of the allegations by this body, which is our constitutional mandate. . . . That’s not a process, Mr. Speaker; it’s a blank check. That’s what I was going to talk about. But out of deference to others that want to speak, I will conclude by saying that one hour to begin only the third impeachment inquiry in U.S. history is a travesty, and a disgrace for this institution.
This was followed by applause.
Hyde’s reply:
I just want the record to be clear. My good friend Mr. Delahunt talked about 60,000 pages that were released that weren’t reviewed or looked at. I want him to know and I want everyone listening to know every single page of anything that was released was reviewed and things that weren’t released were reviewed by our staff. . . . Six (Democrats) never came over to see the material. On the Republican side . . . every member came over to look at the material.16
The actions undertaken in this House inquiry had all of the hallmarks of fairness and yet, from Delahunt’s perspective, what they produced was precisely the opposite—a rush to judgment. The implication here is significant because of what we may extrapolate from it: that the very procedures that seem to demarcate and generate a responsible and ethical democratic process can instead instigate an abuse of power. Indeed, rather than prove that due deliberation should be configured with reference to a mimetic theory of correspondences, the October meetings raised ethical questions about whether to connect Congressional deliberatory practices to the languages that would describe them. Doubts about such connections implicate how to apprehend the relationship between narrative, experience and discourses of authenticity. Do the languages that would represent acts of deliberation adequately and accurately portray a just (and repeatable) political process? If connections between discursivity and event remain tangled and elusive, then an action does not necessarily indicate a “doing” that correlates with a narrative depiction. Not all acts of looking will realize the ideal of fairness or constitute proper attentiveness. And if concrete practices cannot be fully or precisely described, there are narrative gaps within any judgment of whether a practice such as deliberation has made an appearance. How to fill in those gaps is precisely the ethical question.
Hyde’s response effectively avoided any consideration of ethics and representational ambiguity and instead asserted an automatic linkage between looking and testimonials to practicing diligence. The review of the sixty thousand collected pages was presented as concrete evidence of an intangible quality that might be called “thoroughness.” In proclaiming that members of his party had taken a look at the evidence, Hyde delineated a specific technology that promised to transform what some had called a “partisan witch hunt” into a model of judicious review. In effect, he suggested that the act of looking itself inaugurates an ethical stance, and that the presence of an amorphous concept such as deliberation will be demonstrated via a testimonial about its importance. Hence the very phrase “due deliberation” would seem to designate in a straightforward way the ethical actions practiced under its name. Presumably, not only will the facts be discernible and recognizable to spectators, so will the methods deployed to engineer their unbiased review. The style used to designate fidelity to the representational processes depicting facts would seem to be of little significance.
It is important to consider how this model is referenced regularly within political debates as if it does indeed offer a neutral means for adjudicating differences in perspective and as if audiences do follow a neutral order when judging about which positions have substance.
