EDIT
Committee hearings are always like this. After smarmy exchanges about how delighted they are to be speaking to one another, congressmen ask grotesquely biased “Gotcha!” questions that the witnesses, usually harried officials, do their best not to respond to in a meaningful fashion. There are a lot of requests, almost always ignored, for yes or no answers. Mrs Jackson, for example, expended considerable time and effort not saying that greenhouse-gas regulation would raise energy prices and thus harm the economy.
Sometimes, the pretence of give-and-take is abandoned altogether. This morning, Joe “Sorry BP” Barton, a Republican from Texas, asked a laughably leading question, requested a yes or no answer, and then—before receiving one—told Mrs Jackson, “The answer is no.” When she asked, with faux naivety, whether Mr Barton wanted her to answer the question herself or comment on his remarks, he replied with admirable honesty that he didn’t.
What was surprising, given how long Congress has debated this subject, is how incompetent the grandstanding was. I’m reconciled to the fact that America’s congressmen are not all silver-tongued Ciceros. Indeed, most of them seem to have trouble following a train of thought, finishing a sentence or getting noun and verb to agree. Several appeared not to know that the heinous acts they were complaining about were committed not by Mrs Jackson and her staff, but by the courts, or by the administration of George W. Bush. One confused cap-and-trade schemes to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions with the more rigid administrative approach used by the EPA, giving Mrs Jackson a let-out from an otherwise awkward question. Another did not seem to know that Congress had the power to overturn executive regulations. A third proudly declared the he was an engineer, and so knew a thing or two about science, only to have Mrs Jackson retort that she too was an engineer (oops!), and so knew the importance of deferring to experts in a given field. A fourth made a fart joke, and then proudly declared, “That’s humour!”
But in addition to garbled syntax, muddled arguments and childish behaviour, the Republican attack-dogs were surprisingly off-message (the Democrats shared all these faults too, but this wasn’t their show). Some argued that global warming wasn’t proven, others that the EPA was misinterpreting the Clean Air Act (something the Supreme Court has cleared it of) and yet others that all the EPA’s efforts to control pollution of any sort since its creation in 1970 had placed an intolerable burden on business. A representative from Oregon starting banging on about the treatment of wood-based biomass in a bill that has already been shelved. Another Republican seemed to be arguing that the EPA should adopt more stringent regulations than it has proposed—not a popular idea within the party.
EDIT
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/congress_and_climate_change
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