How Much Should We Care about Political Hypocrisy? The Case of Dianne Feinstein and the CIA

Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

Until his death in 2008, Tim Russert hosted NBC’s Sunday morning interview show Meet the Press. While doing so, Russert himself became such an icon that after his passing the Newseum put his desk on display, the only journalist to be so honored. But as commentators pointed out at the time, Russert’s reputation for toughness as an interviewer was somewhat misplaced. Russert’s interview style was tough almost solely in how he tried to embarrass his guests, usually by exposing them as a hypocrite or flip/flopper. Russert often did this by showing video clips or on-screen quotes of guests’ previous statements that contradicted their current positions. (Occasionally he tried gotcha tactics, like asking them to name on-the-fly their favorite bible verse.)

The problem with this approach is that, thankfully, the health of democracy doesn’t depend on the personal virtue of its politicians. The founding fathers, while not always correct, did get this point right. As James Madison famously argued in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”


All politicians are to some degree hypocrites. It goes with the job. Sometimes they contradict themselves because of party competition or the separation of powers. Politicians attack rivals and hold those rivals to a higher standard than they hold themselves, whether those come from another party or another branch of government.

Coalition management also leads to contradictions. To get elected, politicians construct party-based or ideology-based coalitions that are made up of diverse groups of people demanding different things. Those diverse policy demands generally don’t have a unifying philosophical principle that ties them together. They are constructed to build an electoral majority. Furthermore, as the groups that make up electoral coalitions change over time, by necessity the positions espoused by politicians change as well.

Which is why Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein recent hypocrisy (such as it is) on government surveillance doesn’t bother me as much as it appears to bother Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers. This past Tuesday (3/11), Feinstein described on the Senate floor her outrage that the CIA had broken into Senate staffers’ computers and deleted material related to the her committee’s investigation of the CIA’s post 9/11 torture programs. According to Feinstein’s speech, when the agency became worried about her investigation’s direction, “The C.I.A. just went and searched the committee’s computers.”


The CIA is forbidden by law from domestic spying on any American citizen, let alone Congress. Feinstein’s disturbing allegations come almost exactly a year after CIA Director James Clapper lied under oath at a congressional hearing when he denied that the NSA did any domestic data collection. Spying on and lying to Congress are not just illegal but constitutionally troubling. Like all federal agencies, the CIA is a congressional creation and requires annual congressional appropriations to continue its existence. Military and intelligence organizations remaining thoroughly subordinate to Congress is a key difference between full democracies and partial ones.

The next day, Stewart covered the controversy in The Daily Show’s first segment. But unfortunately one of the main points he made about the scandal was to criticize Feinstein for hypocrisy because she had earlier supported NSA surveillance of Americans. He adapted an iconic George Carlin line to the occasion: “See, she doesn't mind that if our security apparatus might be looking at your stuff, ‘cause your stuff is sh*t, but her sh*t, is stuff.” I’m not saying Feinstein isn’t being hypocritical here. But here the hypocrisy is created just as James Madison might have intended. It was her own congressional prerogatives being threatened that finally made her realized that executive agencies might be out of control. Politicians contradicting themselves are a fairly normal part of our political process. Focusing on those contradictions takes time away from the legitimately troubling parts of this story.


The Daily Show does lots of great work, often covering stories (or taking angles on stories) that other news organizations miss. Plus they do it while being funny, which raises the degree of difficulty considerably. And even here, they did spend some time addressing the core issue: that the CIA is spying on and sabotaging a congressional investigation. But the temptation to appear tough by pointing out politicians’ inconsistencies can be as tempting for The Daily Show as it was for Russert and continues to be for many other political commentators.

While I hate to pick on The Daily Show, the news frames it uses to cover a story have real consequences. Comedy shows and similar “soft news” programming can effectively transmit political information to the public and in at least some circumstances influence attitudes toward candidates. They can be especially good at reaching those who aren’t overall heavy consumers of political news. Secondarily, The Daily Show can influence how other media outlets frame stories because news frames “cascade” around the media system. And finally, how prominent news sources cover instances were constitutional norms are threatened is especially important. Since the vast majority of the public is either uninformed about politics or informed but so partisan that they agree with whatever positions their parties take, we largely rely on norms among elites like politicians and journalists to prevent democratic norms from breaking down.

In this case, the banality of political hypocrisy stands out more because the real scandal is so grave. If you are shocked that politicians sometimes contradict themselves, democracy will never fail to shock you. But when your country’s main intelligence bureau is spying on and sabotaging your legislature, you have much bigger problems than hypocrisy.