Committee Hearings Research Articles

The UnAmerican

The UnAmerican

The Late Cultural Cold War

A few days before the Thanksgiving holiday in 1983, nearly half of U.S. households with television sets—more than 100 million viewers—tuned in to watch the obliteration of Lawrence, Kansas in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. A made-for-TV movie that aired primetime on ABC, The Day After climaxed with fictional footage of the bombs bursting in air: a grinding four-minute segment replete with a trio of mushroom clouds towering over humans seared instantaneously to the bone amid the horrified screams of the cowering not-yet-dead. Three years later, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan worked to secure a historic arms control agreement with Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, the president sent a telegram to the director of The Day After, Nicholas Meyer. “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did,” Reagan wrote. The incident is a highlight in Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan. Having set out to write a book “that functioned as a sort of sequel” to Stephen J. Whitfield’s pioneering 1996 study Culture of the Cold War, Hunt contends that because of cultural change and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War culture in the 1980s “bore little resemblance to its early postwar era ancestor.” Unlike the restrictive early Cold War environment of Hollywood blacklists, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, and Hoover’s crusading G-men, in the 1980s an anti-Cold War culture thrived, Hunt argues, “oftentimes eclipsing the dominant Cold War culture in which it rebelled” (2–3).

A Pandemic, Not a Panacea

A Pandemic, Not a Panacea

Confronting Child Maltreatment in Youth Sports.

Confronting Child Maltreatment in Youth Sports.

Comments: What’s Holding Back Production Increases?

The big oil producers are balancing the chasing of more production with delivering dividends to shareholders. So far, the scale is tipping in favor of shareholders. While recent quarterly reports have made this clear, it was reemphasized at a US House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in April when executives from Chevron, BP America, Devon Energy, ExxonMobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Shell USA addressed alleged “price gouging” at the gas pump and rejected pressure to shift their record profits from paying dividends and stock buybacks to ramp up production and lower prices. The executives’ statements ranged from “We can increase production and return value to our shareholders” (Chevron CEO Michael Wirth) to Devon Energy CEO Richard Muncrief and Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield stating “the answer is no” when asked if they would reduce buybacks and dividends. Gretchen Watkins, Shell USA president, said her company intends to make investor returns and increase production and investments in renewable energy. Several of the executives pointed to their industry’s record losses during the pandemic when demand tanked (global fuel consumption fell by more than 25%) and West Texas Intermediate fell off a cliff to –$40/bbl on 20 April 2020 and slowly crept up. Even if the oil price drops, retail gas prices won’t immediately follow to stem the allegations of price gouging. Garrett Golding, a senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, wrote, “In the energy economics world, this phenomenon is known as ‘rockets and feathers,’ where it is commonly observed that prices at the pump shoot up with oil prices like a rocket, but fall like a feather back to the ground after oil prices drop. There are two reasons for this scenario repeating itself during oil-price spikes: the macro-level logistics of how oil and refined products churn through the physical market and the micro-level economic decisions of service station owners and their customers.” Today, demand is strong even at average oil prices of about $103/bbl over the past 6 weeks. Now, the summer driving season is around the corner and consumers are eager to hit the road and fly the skies, finally free(r) of pandemic restrictions and concerns. Yet, the Permian rig count has remained fairly flat over the same period. Despite high oil prices (WTI just below $114/bbl on 17 May), drillers aren’t ramping up activity. Many interrelated factors affect supply and demand. Simplifying the complexity of the global market shines, at best, a narrow beam on some of the factors affecting production. The supply side is dealing with volatility of oil prices; the uncertainty of Europe’s energy supplies, including Europe’s potential embargo on Russian oil; the varied focus on energy transition; sustained fiscal restraint by smaller operators as they continue to reduce or avoid debt; the shortage of sand needed for fracturing in the North American shale plays; labor shortages; the reactivation of idled equipment; and supply chain disruptions. A supply bottleneck is affecting oil country tubular goods (OCTG), which have seen volatility related to the “weak domestic demand in China due to COVID-19 lockdowns and Chinese currency depreciation,” wrote Rystad senior analyst Marina Bozkurt in a recent market note. Business activity has been affected by shutdowns and logistics problems. “OCTG prices may remain pretty high this year, driven by higher costs of raw materials due to geopolitical tensions globally and government regulations to reduce carbon emissions.” Prices continue to increase at Japanese OCTG mills, where the focus is primarily on value-added products such as 13Cr material. Propping up prices are “tight global availability and strong demand. Despite a possible price fluctuation for raw materials, prices will unlikely cool down significantly as long as the Russia-Ukraine situation continues.” In an April report, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said the growing gap between OPEC+ production quotas and actual oil production is being driven by production capacity constraints in several OPEC+ countries, largely attributable to Angola, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Their capacity is limited by “infrastructure issues and the difficulty of attracting sufficient investment to offset production declines at existing wells.” The shortfall was nearly 1.1 million B/D in February, the most recent month for which there were official production data available. In May, JP Morgan lowered its outlook for 2022 global oil demand by 1 million B/D, citing higher oil prices, a weakening growth outlook, and escalating geopolitical tensions. How this plays out will affect producers’ appetite to increase or decrease their production or reconsider their priorities.

How Are Politicians Informed? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress

How are politicians informed and who do politicians seek information from? The role of information has been at the center for research on legislative organizations but there is a lack of systematic empirical work on the information that Congress seeks to acquire and consider. To examine the information flow between Congress and external groups, we construct the most comprehensive dataset to date on 74,082 congressional committee hearings and 755,540 witnesses spanning 1960–2018. We show descriptive patterns of how witness composition varies across time and committee and how different types of witnesses provide varying levels of analytical information. We develop theoretical expectations for why committees may invite different types of witnesses based on committee intent, interbranch relations, and congressional capacity. Our empirical evidence shows how committees’ partisan considerations can affect how much committees turn to outsiders for information and from whom they seek information.

Threats to valuing diverse voices in public debates about disability. A case study from social media*

This study aimed to highlight the threats that use of social media poses to valuing diverse voices and different kinds of expertise about disability in public debates by exploring how disability advocates responded on social media to the evidence presented by researchers to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. Data were collected from the social media platform Twitter during the first week of Public Hearing 3 of the Royal Commission in December 2019. Tweets by 48 individuals and 27 representatives of advocacy groups who were not described as academic researchers in their Twitter profile were collected, anonymised, and coded using template analysis techniques. Findings showed that social media commentators were critical of the presence and participation of researchers in the Commission hearings and questioned the legitimacy of their research methods and findings. These commentators stated that researchers should not speak “for” or “about” people with disabilities and rejected evidence that did not resonate with their own individual experience. For the Commission to deliver meaningful recommendations to improve the disability sector, disability policy and the lives of people with disabilities, it is important to value both stories of lived experience and rigorous research evidence. Public discourse that undermines the relationships between researchers and disability self-advocates and advocates may be unhelpful for future collaboration on the development of better policy and practice.

The Effect of Gender on Interruptions at Congressional Hearings

Women in Congress are highly effective legislators. Yet, if women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, they may face a gender-related impediment. We examine speech patterns during more than 24,000 congressional committee hearings from 1994 to 2018 to determine whether women Members are more likely to be interrupted than men. We find that they are. This is especially true in Senate committees—where women are about 10% more likely to be interrupted. Furthermore, in hearings that discuss women’s issues, women are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than while discussing other issues. We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire “interruption clusters,” an aggressive form of interruption. We further consider a range of moderating factors, which yields little evidence that women change their communication strategy as they gain experience in Congress. We also find suggestive evidence that interruptions are driven by mixed-gender interactions.

Human Right Concerns in Vietnam’s Cybersecurity Law: From International Discourse to a Comparative Perspective

Abstract Vietnam's Cyber Security Law, which officially came into effect on the first day of 2019, is considered by the Vietnamese authorities to be an important advance of the Vietnamese legal system in catching up with new information technology issues and addressing the challenges of the Revolution 4.0. The legislation, however, did not come without opposition. Specifically, international dissatisfaction with the law was clearly articulated in January 2019 in the Universal Periodic Review—a major human rights protection mechanism under the management of the UN Human Rights Council; and also, in the Human Rights Committee hearing on Vietnam's implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in March of that year. Within its limited resources, this article first tries to identify and evaluate recommendations and comments during the two events in relation to the Cyber Security Law, made by international actors including states, non-governmental organizations, and authoritative United Nations institutions. With the data, the article can then categorize three vital human rights concerns regarding the law, according to international perception. They comprise (1) the legal philosophy of ‘national security’; (2) obligations imposed on internet businesses; and (3) judicial review/remedy. Finally, the research engages in an extensive comparative analysis between these concerns and international practices to reach different conclusions on their compatibility and possible solutions. The authors believe that constructive criticisms from the international community can be carefully garnered in order to contribute to the refinement of Vietnam’s cyber-security laws in the future.

Ruptured alliances: Prosecutorial lobbying, victims’ interests and punishment policy in Illinois

Using a combination of FOIA-requested legislative committee hearings and in-depth interviews, this manuscript investigates the work of Illinois prosecutorial lobbyists in state-level crime policy during a time of penal reform. I find that prosecutorial lobbyists are a regular and influential presence in policy discussions, advocating primarily for 'law and order' policies that expand prosecutorial discretion, even following the Great Recession. I also find that they repeatedly evoke their relationship to crime victims to frame their policy positions for a bipartisan audience. However, attention to discourse reveals that victims’ own interests regularly clash with prosecutorial discretion. These clashes create what I term discursive ruptures, or uncomfortable and surprising rhetorical fissures that emerge in what is otherwise seen as a near iron-clad political alliance. In such instances, prosecutors risk alienating a key source of their political legitimacy to protect their own discretionary authority. Beyond insight into momentary political discomfort, these ruptures suggest that the powerful and productive alliance between prosecutors and victims is neither as natural nor as robust as relational perspectives have generally assumed, unearthing fault lines in prosecutors’ unparalleled power to punish.

Barriers to Charitable Nonprofit Access and Advocacy amid a Pandemic: A Case Study of the Louisiana State Legislature

Abstract Research has long established nonprofit organizations’ vital role advocating for the needs of vulnerable populations before legislative policymakers. In the best of times, it is difficult for 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits employing grassroots advocacy to mobilize vulnerable constituencies to compete with 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) advocacy and special interest groups. The latter organizations inherently have greater flexibility and resources to lobby lawmakers directly, permitting greater access to influencing the policy agenda. Through a multi-method case study of the 2020 regular session of the Louisiana State Legislature, this article demonstrates how the COVID-19 pandemic’s unique contextual conditions made legislative advocacy more difficult than usual for charitable nonprofits promoting a progressive policy response to the pandemic within a politically conservative state. Conducted through interviews with nonprofit leaders and an analysis of legislative records and committee hearings, the case study reveals specific barriers that hampered charitable nonprofits’ access to the legislative process, including physical capacity restrictions and health concerns, as well as issues with virtual legislative protocols and conservative committee chairs’ discretion to ignore remote testimony. The article analyzes how these barriers negatively impacted charitable nonprofits’ ability to advocate for vulnerable populations and explores potential implications for equitable political participation and response to the pandemic.

Expert participation in 25 years of Wisconsin abortion policymaking

ObjectiveState-level abortion restrictions grew considerably in number over the last two decades. This study examines the scope of expert testimony given in legislative committee hearings at which these laws are first debated. Study DesignWe gathered 265 testimonies given by experts at Wisconsin legislative committee hearings on 34 abortion bills from 1995 to 2019. We coded testimonies to identify testifiers’ ideological leaning and source of expertise. We conducted descriptive analyses of testifiers’ participation. ResultsExperts with anti-abortion rights views testified more often than experts with pro-abortion rights views (2.1 vs 1.4 testimonies per expert). Experts with an activism background testified more often than experts in medicine (2.5 vs 1.3 testimonies per expert). Anti-abortion activist experts represented the largest proportion of testimonies (32%) but the smallest proportion of testifiers (16%). Pro-abortion rights medical experts gave the fewest testimonies (24%) relative to their proportion of testifiers (31%). The number of testimonies given by pro-abortion rights activist experts remained stable over the study period. Testimonies given by all other kinds of experts were more numerous in recent years. ConclusionsThe experts who testify most frequently tend to espouse anti-abortion views and have backgrounds in activism rather than healthcare. These repeat testifiers may have more opportunities to build relationships with legislators and thus influence policy. Anti-abortion rights activist experts’ outsized role in legislative hearings, especially in recent years, should concern advocates of evidence-based reproductive health policy. Medical experts may be deterred from giving testimony by logistical or other structural barriers in the legislative process. ImplicationsThe family planning field should conduct more research on the role of experts in abortion policymaking. Future studies should examine testifiers in other states and identify barriers pro-abortion medical experts may face to testifying, as these experts are key for creating evidence-based abortion policy.

The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Afterlife and Memorialization of Imagery Surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Given that truth commissions are heavily intertwined with the social politics of societal memory and the historical perception of events, the imagery surrounding these hearings therefore plays a role worth examining throughout this memorialization process. This essay investigates how imagery from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings has experienced an afterlife in the subsequent decades, and how this afterlife may differ from the images’ original values and purpose. This body of work examines the extended life of these images beyond that of straightforward media representation of the event—looking at how these archival elements have been reappropriated and incorporated into fine-art bodies of work by artists and documentarians working in photography, such as Sue Williamson, Jo Ratcliffe, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, and others, in order to respond to the TRC by participating in and driving conversations surrounding the commission’s ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies. Through a semiotic analysis of the imagery itself, and analysis of the contextual placement and dissemination of the imagery in both its original and subsequent usages, this research therefore seeks to holistically understand the role of visual media in South Africa’s era of transitional justice and reckoning.

More than agents: Federal bureaucrats as information suppliers in policymaking

AbstractBureaucrats are frequently conceptualized as agents of Congress, with much focus placed on their expertise as policy implementers or evaluators. That same expertise, though, allows bureaucrats to supply Congress with information throughout the policy process. Bureaucrats are just one of the many actors that compete to supply Congress with information to define problems and develop solutions. Congressional committees must prioritize all available information, deciding what to attend and what to ignore. I argue that bureaucrats are more likely to testify at hearings when there is (1) limited availability of alternative information sources, (2) the information they hold is necessary for achieving committee goals or tasks (ex. agency oversight), and (3) the information they have can alleviate diverse committee workloads. Using a new dataset of witnesses testifying at congressional committee hearings, I find that the prioritization of bureaucrats as witnesses is explainable in terms of policy area, committee type, and committee agenda.

Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen: Aerospace Neurophysiology and Deep Brain Stimulation Pioneer.

The Norwegian physician Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen (1912–1991) was a pioneer in deep brain stimulation and aerospace neurophysiology, but for several reasons, his story has remained untold. During WW2, he collaborated with a renowned military underground resistance group against the Nazi occupants and then had to flee to neutral Sweden. He returned to participate in the liberation of Northern Norway as a Captain in the US Special Forces also working with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services—precursor for CIA) and received a citation from General Eisenhower for his contributions. Sem-Jacobsen then spent several years in the US training in psychiatry and clinical neurophysiology at the Mayo Clinic. He constructed his own medical technical devices, was among the first to develop deep brain stimulation, and made the smallest EEG and EKG recording systems yet produced, also used by the American astronauts walking on the Moon. But he was more an inventor than a researcher, and few of his observations were published in peer-reviewed medical journals. He built his own neurophysiologic institute for neurosurgery, deep brain recordings, and deep brain stimulation in Oslo's main psychiatric hospital, but was sponsored by US military forces and NASA. He knew CIA Director William E. Colby personally, and rumors soon flourished that Sem-Jacobsen conducted secret mind control experiments for American authorities and the CIA. These accusations were investigated, and long after his death, he was officially absolved by a Hearing Committee appointed by the Norwegian Government. Nevertheless, all his personal files were burnt by his family who was still harassed by investigative journalists. Sem-Jacobsen also documented some of his work on film, but the whereabouts of these films have remained unknown. I searched for them for several years and recently discovered numerous films and photographs in an old barn in rural Norway. These films and photographs document in-action neurophysiology recordings in divers, pilots, and astronauts, and they show how Sem-Jacobsen in collaboration with experienced neurosurgeons in Oslo conducted the very first trials with deep brain stimulation in patients with Parkinson disease. He apparently even tried subthalamic stimulation as early as in the 1950s.

Financial Services – Royal Commission and Its Aftermath

The financial services industry in Australia underwent vast changes recently with the conclusion of the Royal Commission hearings and its recommendations. It was in late 2017 that the Australian government announced the formation of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. This came amidst a prolonged political and industry wrangling despite an urgent need for untangling the several issues buffeting the industry. This article focuses on certain significant issues that may confront foreign financial service providers (FFSPs) in Australia, especially the changes made to the law triggered by the recommendations of the Royal Commission. It will also discuss intended reliefs to FFSPs contained in a recently released Consultation Paper.

The American Promise.

In April 2021, at a Congressional Ways and Means Committee hearing regarding proposed national investments in water infrastructure,1 a pediatrician (M.H.A.) held up a lead pipe excavated from the Flint home of Oscar and Elizabeth Brown. In the 1950s, Mr and Mrs Brown moved from Mississippi to Flint as part of the Great Migration. Fleeing the racism and oppression of Jim Crow south, millions of African Americans moved to cities like Flint, Detroit, and Chicago. They were hoping to find that elusive American Promise, hoping to build a foundation of prosperity, opportunity, and equality for their children and grandchildren that was not afforded to them or their ancestors.

From Complexity to Clarity

From Complexity to Clarity

Moving away from the 4-hour block: Arizona’s distinctive path to reversing its restrictive language policies

ABSTRACT In spring 2019, without controversy or fanfare and without violating the voter mandate of Proposition 203, emergent bilinguals in Arizona were once again granted unrestricted access to dual language bilingual education after nearly 20 years. The policy change was accomplished through a seemingly small piece of legislation that reduced the daily Structured English Immersion requirement from four hours to two hours. In this study, we analyze the Senate and House education committee hearings in which this legislation was unanimously approved before being signed into law by the governor. Using critical discourse analysis and through a theoretical lens of interest convergence, we examine the strategic moves utilized by speakers and legislators to build consensus for this remarkable, yet overlooked, legislation. We found that, in contrast to policy reforms in California and Massachusetts, which used a “multilingualism-for-all” strategy, the speakers and legislators in Arizona focused on English learners. Yet, they worked to show that a change benefitting English learners would also benefit parents, schools, teachers, districts, and even the state of Arizona. Our findings suggest that advocacy for bilingual education that is informed by contextual awareness and translated into the local discourse can produce success, even in conservative contexts such as Arizona.

The 1891 International Copyright Act: Lobbying Behind the Scenes

The 1891 International Copyright Act: Lobbying Behind the Scenes