Time & Perspective Quote by Bruce Babbitt

“Star chamber” is the kind of phrase politicians reach for when they want to make procedure sound like persecution. Babbitt’s line doesn’t try to win the argument on facts; it tries to win it on vibe. The opening, “They haul you up there,” frames congressional oversight as a physical drag to the scaffold, not a constitutional check. “You know” performs casual intimacy, inviting the listener to share a weary common sense: we’ve all seen this movie, and it’s rigged. “Week after week” turns hearings into a punishment in themselves, a drumbeat of suspicion that stains even if the transcript never produces a smoking gun.

The real pivot is the alleged punchline: “we found nothing, but now it’s time for special counsel.” Babbitt is accusing investigators of a self-justifying machine, where the absence of evidence doesn’t close the case; it escalates it. That’s a critique of incentives. High-profile inquiries reward spectacle, airtime, and the appearance of seriousness. If “nothing” is found, the only way to keep the narrative alive is to rebrand the hunt as more “independent,” more righteous, more relentless.

Contextually, this is the late-20th-century Washington template: congressional investigations as partisan theater, and the special counsel as both remedy and accelerant. Babbitt’s intent is to delegitimize the process before it produces conclusions, recasting accountability as harassment and preemptively insulating targets from whatever comes next. The subtext is blunt: the point was never truth, it was damage.