Across the Ocean, as the Washington Examiner reports, on the day after the midterm elections the Democrats who sit on the Judiciary Committee were already recruiting lawyers and investigators for the 120th Congress. A notice posted online seeks legal counsels and staff for oversight and investigations, as well as clerks and communications officers; for the investigators it prizes experience in inquiry, and sound political judgment. The victory itself is very great: NBC, the same paper reports, projects that the Democrats will hold 258 seats in the lower house, 43 more than in 2024, and that they have wrested seven Senate seats from their opponents, so as to hold at least 54, though not all the votes had yet been counted. Hence the exultation. Senator Ed Markey wrote that new forests would have to be planted for all the subpoenas his side would print; Robert Garcia, who is said to be in line to chair the oversight committee, told his opponents on election night to get themselves lawyers. Among his concerns are counted the alleged corruption of the Trump family, immigration enforcement, corporate misconduct, and the Epstein files, which the Justice Department is accused of withholding in breach of the law.

The other side does not keep silent. A Democratic strategist, unnamed, said that the people had demanded at the ballot box that corruption be checked and that abuse of power against critics be curbed; his party would follow the evidence and would persecute no one for holding a different view. Nor is the cause wholly invented: recently Judge Jesse Furman, as was reported at the time, ruled that Maurene Comey had been dismissed by the administration contrary to law. Yet Senator Elissa Slotkin said in October that investigations should aim to make young people think twice about joining the administration; for this a watchdog group, whose name the reports do not give, filed complaints with the Senate ethics committee and with the Justice Department, accusing her of making threats. She defends herself by saying she was warning only against crimes. Hakeem Jeffries, finally, who looks likely to be the next speaker of the House, said that the American people do not want revenge; that the prices of groceries, gasoline, housing and healthcare must come down; and he tried to quiet the talk of impeaching the president.

When I read these things, the Mamilian inquiry comes back to my mind. After Jugurtha's money had bought our nobles, a tribunal was lawfully set up; no one denied that the accused were guilty. But it was conducted harshly, more from rumour and the passions of the plebs than from the truth; for the plebs, as the nobility had done before, used its victory without restraint. And the courts themselves, held by the knights after Gaius Gracchus and by the senators after Sulla, were passed between the orders like spoils, and never handed back to the commonwealth. I once wrote: "The habit of parties and factions, and then of every evil art, arose at Rome a few years before, out of leisure and the abundance of those things which mortals count first." I see the same habit now across the Ocean.

Cato said in the senate: "We have long since lost the true names of things: because giving away other people's goods is called generosity, and recklessness in wrongdoing is called courage." Today revenge is called oversight, and faction is called a mandate. An investigator hired for his political judgment has already reached his verdict before he begins to inquire. The lawyers outside the chamber, whom the reports call left-leaning but do not name, fight for pay. I grant it: a president who dismisses officials contrary to law ought to be checked, and inquiry is the duty of a senate, not a crime. But the man who talks of frightening the young before the inquiry, who boasts of subpoenas before the evidence, is building himself a road to power; the law is his pretext.

The remedy is at hand, but hardly to be hoped for. Let facts be investigated, not men; let investigators be chosen for diligence, not for factional judgment; let whoever signs a subpoena publish his grounds and his witnesses; let whoever abuses an inquiry for revenge be put in the dock himself. Hakeem Jeffries is right to disavow revenge; but a leader who cannot rein in his own men has words, not command. So, unless virtue returns to the leading men, inquiries, like our courts of old, will pass from one faction to the other, and never to the commonwealth. What is prepared today against the vanquished comes back tomorrow upon the victor.