Josh recently put up a post that details some of his reservations about extending video coverage to committee hearings, as inspired by some commentary from Glenn Beck.

Their argument goes like this: putting video further into the legislative process will inject an undue amount of politics into a process that should be legislative.

The problem, however, lies in the distinction between the legislative and the political. According to this argument, the legislative is to be protected from the undue public forces of the political that come with having proceedings televised. I agree that there exists a large gap between the political and the legislative. My evaluation, however, is very different.

Josh writes, “The more spotlights we put on politicians, the more we run the risk that the politician will posture for the camera and not be a legislator.” This is a great place to start. I agree that increased public scrutiny has immense potential to affect the way that lawmakers act during congressional proceedings. I recognize, however, that electoral pressure is an essential part of political incentives. Electoral pressure, however, is controlled right now more by a fickle media narrative than it is by a measured examination of legislative substance.

My feelings could be summed up with a rewriting of that sentence: “The more spotlights we put on politicians, the more we make being a good legislator the best way to posture for the camera.”

Congressional proceedings are the result of a complex interaction from various angles: tradition, law, coalitions, electoral pressure, lobbyists, media attention, constituent pressure, expectations from the executive branch, to name a few. These factors don’t exist independently, however. Excessive Presidential pressure may come with corrective media attention, just as inappropriate lobbyist clout is sometimes balances by constituent pressure.

To say that cameras in committees will just encourage inappropriate stump speeches is to underestimate our politicians and our committees. The current state of political messaging is the result of the limited capacity of the media to convey procedural and legal intricacies, the details of which are the substance of Congress. When coverage of the details is broadened, politicians be freed to engage publicly with legal details too confusing to fit into a 90 second news segment.

The potential audience for committee hearings is as varied as the jurisdictions of the committees themselves, and opening their proceedings to public scrutiny should allow the electoral consequences of bad-faith participation to be more reliable.

We’re bound to not like a lot of what lawmakers say; that’s part of what makes us passionate about politics. Our best defense against rhetorical manipulation isn’t to withdraw public scrutiny from the debate, but to use the debate to enhance the nature of public scrutiny.