Patience, Grasshopper.
The purpose of these hearings is to "energize the base," pol-talk for getting our side to get off their butts to vote in the mid-terms. The hearings are not designed to change minds about who to vote for, but they are intended to change minds about whether to vote. That is, to some extent, an exercise in pot-boiling, and I have no problem keeping the people riled.
Last night, Bill Maher had Ms. Conway on his panel. She's an abomination, and I skipped most of that segment of the show. But I'm glad she was on, because it helped to pluck my - and I hope others' - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" string one more time.
I've heard it said that the purpose of the hearings is to give DOJ information it can use to prosecute Trump and his minions. Maybe, but the information could be given quietly, so, to the extent the DOJ is a target, the aim is to create political pressure on A.G. Garland. I can't say I approve, but demanding anything like ethical purity from pols of either party is a fool's errand. I still think the principal purpose of the hearing is to stoke anti-Trump sentiment.
Before I fast-forwarded last night, Conway tried to portray the Dems' citing 1/6 as a reason to vote against Trump as somehow disreputable. She called it "saying the quite part out loud." But if an attempt to destroy our political system doesn't raise a "political" issue, what should? (As I said, she's a really dreadful person. The more we see of her going into the elections, the better.)
To the extent that the Committee is actually doing substantive work, I disagree that there is a distinction between "rehashing what happened" and trying to figure out how to keep it from happening again. Didn't someone say something about what happens if we don't study history?
FWIW, I will offer one suggestion to the Committee, which it cannot implement and probably cannot recommend: fixing the filibuster. We got Trump because government was dysfunctional, and it was dysfunctional because the Republicans used the non-talking filibuster to throw sand in the gears and then pretend that the party with fifty-one senators was "in charge" and, therefore, responsible for nothing getting done. If the Senate restores the talking filibuster, Congress will spring back to life, compromise will become a good thing, and the republic will be saved from demagogues like Trump. If not, then not.