When the officeholder flees the office, the Republic notices

The New York Post reports that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declined to appear before a congressional hearing convened to examine roughly one billion dollars in alleged waste and fraud inside the city's homelessness system. Members of Congress, the report tells us, called her absence an act of "contempt" and described it as "shameful." I am not in a position to weigh every detail of that underlying scandal; but the fact of the absence — that much stands plainly in the record.

I want to speak not to the mayor's personal culpability, which a proper inquiry must determine, but to the act of refusal itself. A public officer holds authority on trust, and that trust runs in two directions: downward to the citizens who depend on honest stewardship, and upward to the oversight bodies the law has appointed. When an officer declines to appear before such a body, she does not merely inconvenience a committee. She weakens the very mechanism by which the public confirms that its trust has not been abused.

I was known, in my own time, to counsel that the character of a republic depends less on its written forms than on the habits of those who exercise power within them. A constitution may provide for hearings and subpoenas and sworn testimony, but those instruments are inert if officers simply decline to attend. The written guarantee means nothing without the behavioral habit of compliance. One evasion, unrebuked, teaches every subsequent officer that the cost of transparency is optional.

I understand, as inference rather than established fact, that the underlying matter — a billion dollars entrusted to address the suffering of unhoused citizens — is grave in itself. Waste and fraud in programs meant for the most vulnerable among us is not an administrative inconvenience; it is a betrayal of the specific people the program was designed to serve. That alone warrants the most rigorous accounting. The decision to avoid that accounting makes the injury compound.

Nor does it serve the mayor's own interests, properly understood. Officers who engage forthrightly with oversight — who appear, who answer, who correct the record where they can — generally emerge with their reputations more intact than those who flee. Absence is rarely interpreted as innocence. It is interpreted as calculation, and calculation in the face of public inquiry corrodes trust faster than the underlying facts, however embarrassing those facts may be.

The Congress, for its part, bears a duty in the opposite direction: to conduct its inquiries with the gravity the moment requires, not as theater for partisan advantage but as genuine fact-finding on behalf of the citizenry. An oversight hearing that becomes a spectacle serves no one — not the homeless residents of Los Angeles, not the Republic, and not the credibility of the oversight function itself.

My counsel, then, is this: every officer who holds public money and public authority should treat the summons of a legitimate oversight body as a duty, not an imposition. And every legislative body conducting such inquiries should be worthy of that compliance — rigorous, fair, and plainly in pursuit of truth rather than faction. The Republic's health depends on both sides of that compact holding.