Not endemic

I spent the last two weeks working on a personal research project, trying to see whether the Darrell Issa all-Catholic-male-panel-with-no-women-at-a-contraception-hearing fiasco was representative of panel participation at House committee hearings in general. It was mainly to see whether House committees are very selective about the interest groups and institutions that are allowed to present a testimony at the hearing. It wasn’t a scientific test, I basically read through a lot of testimonies for pretty much every committee and made a note whenever I found a hearing that was overwhelmingly dominated by a single interest group/institution’s representatives.

In the end I found… nothing significant. I didn’t do this as comprehensively as I could have (for example, I could have tried to identify all of the key interest groups and institutions with a stake in each debate or hearing, and checked to see if there was sufficient representation in the hearing panel – that was the ultimate problem with Issa’s hearing, after all). But, all in all the hearings I looked through seemed generally fair. I would add the qualification that the hearing titles, introductions, and even summaries for Republican-led committees tend to be a little more… rude? Aggressive? They’re certainly more loaded and politically slanted, but the actual panels for the hearings did end up having fair representation from a variety of interest groups and institutions (one could argue about bias or over-representation, but I made no attempt to measure that). Even the hearings against ObamaCare had representation from people who spoke positively about some  aspects of the law.

I do think Congress should investigate what happened in the Issa hearing case. An important aspect of evaluating public policy is being able to identify all of the stakeholders to a particular issue or policy. If a committee head can’t do that, he or she does not deserve the position. If Issa’s political views or ego were the actual reason behind his strange panel selection, then that will reflect badly on his authority and some kind of reprimand would be only fair.

All that aside, it is good to know that the Issa fiasco will most likely be a one-off.

BLOG RELAUNCH

OK, the relaunch doesn’t come with a facelift, but it is a pretty significant change so hear me out.

I noticed in November/December that much of what I was writing on this blog was reactionary. I sensed that I was posting mostly to comment on big news events or hot discussions around the blogosphere. In a way, this sort of defeats the purpose of this blog. I intended for this site to be a place for deliberative discussion; but, with time, I’ve come to learn that talking primarily about headline news does not lend itself to thoughtful commentary on the issues which I’m especially interested in. Simply put, I wasn’t happy with the standard of my blogging, and I think a big reason for that was because I felt like I was forcing myself to write about things making the front pages, something that felt unnatural to say the least. This will primarily what I’m trying to change with the relaunch.

Not all of my old posts were related to current events – postson topics such as the release of a jobs report or a Twitter scandal will pretty much disappear. Things like my commentary on Iceland and its monetary policy, or the recent stuff on the Middle East, or the role of rhetoric in politics are more fun to write, hopefully more fun to read, and draw visitors regularly even weeks after posting (according to the blog statistics). Of course, I will also try to put in a few words on any debates over public policy and publicly funded programs that catch my interest.

Two other change: link sharing through omelettes will be irregular because a daily run is a bit too much to handle at the moment (though it may return to its full form some time over the summer), and posting frequency will drop to what its been for the past month, a couple of times every few weeks.

I ultimately hope you all get more out of this blog in the future!

(The old posts are archived on a separate Eggshells and Fury WordPress page, but I will no longer manage those posts or respond to comments).