A straight “Unethical Quote of the Week” or “Incompetent Elected Official” EA honor still doesn’t do Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) justice. She is special. Well, I hope she is.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was crossing rhetorical sword points with Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) during the House hearing over U.S. military action in Iran. When Rep. Chu accused the administration of not caring about Americans’ financial struggles—which is, after all, completely irrelevant to the decision to defang a hostile nation seeking nuclear weapons that has been at war with the U.S. since 1979— Bessent asked her who was President of the U.S. during World War I. After a pause, apparently to check all the blank files in her memory banks, Chu answered “I don’t know.”
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Ethics Alarms 
Welp…bet she could tell you why Black Lives Matter, that George Floyd is a transitional hero, and that the 1619 Project is irreproachably sacrosanct.
PWS
I don’t know… That’s not actually a civics question, it’s historical trivia. And sure, some familiarity with history is probably good, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it necessary, especially when the question is completely tangential to the topic at hand…. Can anyone say what would have changed if she’d answered the question correctly? Would it have clarified something Bessent was supposed to answer? Can anyone say how the knowledge of Wilson’s name would have changed the way Chu asked her questions?
I’m particularly apathetic to this in the face of Jewish Space Lasers, the possibility of Guam capsizing, women being able to reject rapist’s sperm, whether the Mars rover could take a picture of the Armstrong’s flag, or literally anything that Maisie Hirono has ever said… Chu isn’t necessarily an idiot, she just doesn’t know who the president was during WWI. I have the feeling Trump, alongside the lion’s share of congress wouldn’t have before this either.
I honestly think the people saying what Bessent did was wrong had the better of it. He was there to answer questions, not quiz the representative. We shouldn’t let people normalize holding a Trivia session to filibuster time like that.
Why not? Is this so different than a witness answering a question with a total non sequitur? If you ask someone why are eggs so expensive, and he or she answers that the unemployment rate among chicken farmers is going down. Stuff such as that happens a lot.
Or why are congressmen allowed to make a 4:50 speech on something unrelated to the hearing or the witness and then ask some dumb throwaway question at the end?
Actually the why is that there are cameras at every hearing. If the hearings were not televised, they might get some serious questions and germane answers instead of every day a circus.