In the annals of congressional oversight, there are legitimate constitutional inquiries meant to check executive power, and then there is the legislative equivalent of a bitter ex-spouse drunk-texting at two in the morning. On Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Republicans hauled former Special Counsel Jack Smith before the committee for a marathon session grandly titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” It was a title that practically begged for a gavel-strike before a single question was asked—the parliamentary equivalent of filing a lawsuit pre-emptively named I Already Won. Smith’s ultimate crime, as best as institutional scholars can decipher from the posturing, was daring to apply equal protection under the law by indicting Donald Trump twice. Naturally, the Republican apparatus has treated this constitutional duty as an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté.
If you have monitored congressional proceedings for any length of time, you are already well-acquainted with the unique brand of performative indignity that is Rafael Edward Cruz. What renders the Texas senator so utterly tragic is not an absence of cognitive horsepower. Cruz was a star debater at Princeton, earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law, and clerked at the Supreme Court. He understands constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and the rules of evidence better than nearly anyone else in the chamber. He watched Donald Trump disparage his wife’s appearance and link his father to the Kennedy assassination in 2016, and yet he concluded the optimal career trajectory was to spend the next decade functioning as Trump’s personal footstool. Cruz knows better—which makes his theatrical outrage an act of pure, cynical debasement. He systematically trades away institutional integrity and personal self-respect for a few extra seconds of MAGA algorithmic engagement. On Tuesday, he put on a masterclass in this tragic trade-off.
Cruz spent his allotted time attempting to manufacture a constitutional scandal out of routine investigative subpoenas issued to political organizations. When Smith—demonstrating the typical precision of a veteran federal prosecutor—noted that he could not recall the specific granular details of every single third-party document request off the top of his head, Cruz underwent a full theatrical meltdown: “You can sigh all you like; it’s a very simple question. You know damn well you did!”
To drive home his point, Cruz unveiled a massive, custom-printed cardboard poster board claiming Smith issued 197 subpoenas to “spy on” 430 Republican organizations. He then solemnly inquired whether it was now a federal crime to be a registered Republican. Smith answered with a crisp, deadpan, “Absolutely not, sir,”—a response that logically reduced the senator’s premise to absolute dust, yet Cruz pressed on regardless. He capped off his performance by invoking Les Misérables, congratulating Smith for succeeding “where Richard Nixon failed,” and musing on whether the former prosecutor owned a pink hat. Ted Cruz appears to operate on the rhetorical assumption that if one shouts legal absurdities with sufficient cadence and volume, baseline logic will eventually bend to accommodate them. It never does. The room just gets louder, the tax dollars get wasted faster, and the Senate floor looks more like an open-mic night at a regional comedy club.
Yet, in a room packed with aspiring cable-news commentators, Cruz was somehow not even the most profoundly misguided figure on the dais. Both he and Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri arrived armed with visual aids mounted on foam core. But where Cruz’s poster was merely loud and unhinged, Schmitt’s managed an even rarer feat: it was completely, irredeemably wrong.
Schmitt leaned over his microphone with the puffed-chest swagger of a man about to deliver a prosecution closing argument, blissfully unaware he was about to set his own legal reputation on fire. He began by demanding to know if Smith had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024—a date Schmitt clearly thought was seismic because it fell right after news broke regarding Fani Willis and Nathan Wade. Smith, looking like a man asked to solve an algebra equation in Aramaic, asked what city this hypothetical game took place in. “Atlanta,” Schmitt deadpanned. Smith politely shook his head; he had not been to a Hawks game.
That was Schmitt’s cue to drop what he evidently envisioned as the viral centerpiece of his political career. “What would you say,” Schmitt asked, wearing a smug grin that practically radiated self-satisfaction, “if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta for a Warriors-Hawks game on February 3, 2024? I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself.”
A Senate staffer—with a physical assist from Louisiana’s John Kennedy, who looked thrilled to be aiding and abetting the ambush—flourished a giant poster board of the intercepted texts. But in a move straight out of a cheap magic trick, Schmitt’s team yanked the board away before Smith or his counsel could actually read the print. When committee Democrats requested the evidence be entered into the record, Schmitt grandly promised it would follow later, declaring, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” before wrapping up his time by calling the former prosecutor a “total dirtbag.” It was a masterclass in aggressive, unearned superiority—a United States Senator strutting around the room after stepping directly into a trap he dug himself.
Enter Amy Klobuchar, whose expression during Schmitt’s soliloquy suggested she was actively re-evaluating every life decision, career choice, and electoral victory that had brought her into the same room as these people. Sitting through Schmitt’s performance was clearly testing her faith in representative democracy, but she dutifully secured a copy of the poster board, handed it to Smith, and watched the entire Republican conspiracy theory evaporate in real time.
Smith looked at the text, remembered his own life, and casually noted that around that date he had gone to a University of Maryland women’s basketball game to watch sensation Caitlin Clark, escorted by his standard U.S. Marshals security detail.
“Could it then be,” Klobuchar asked, adopting the gentle, deliberate tone of a primary school teacher helping a child identify basic shapes, “that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?”
It could. It was.
Schmitt had managed to get the city wrong, the state wrong, the sport’s governing body wrong, and the team wrong. The only variable he got right was the date, and that was only because someone else had printed it at the top of the foam core. A sitting United States Senator—and a former collegiate athlete, no less—accused a former federal prosecutor of committing felony perjury under oath because he glanced at the word “Hawk” in a text thread, refused to do five seconds of basic reading comprehension, and let his partisan confirmation bias do the rest. It wasn’t a smoking gun. It was just an arrogant partisan with a giant piece of cardboard and a complete absence of basic research skills.
When caught in a display of institutional ignorance this massive, a normal human being possesses the baseline self-awareness to say, “Yeah, you got me.”
Not Eric Schmitt. Rather than acknowledging that he had just staged a high-profile legislative trainwreck on C-SPAN, the senator reacted like a cornered narcissist, accusing Klobuchar of trying to “rehabilitate the witness.” Klobuchar snapped back with the patience of an exhausted prosecutor dealing with a toddler: “I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag.” Unbothered by reality, Schmitt declared he stood by his statement. To close her time, Klobuchar read the official box score directly into the Congressional Record like a mother explaining basic addition to a struggling child: Iowa beat Maryland 93 to 85, Caitlin Clark dropped 30 points, and a United States Senator who hurls insults at a witness based on an illiterate mix-up over a team name owes that witness a public apology.
He did not apologize. In fact, after proving himself to be an unmitigated dumbass on national television, Schmitt fled the Capitol and went straight onto The Charlie Kirk Show to quadruple down on his own dumb fuckery.
