I just watched some of this morning's subcommittee hearing — the one in which Stephen Colbert testified. I had to watch it on the C-SPAN website because it was telecast on C-SPAN 3. For some unknown reason, even though DirecTV (my satellite provider) carries C-SPAN 1 and C-SPAN 2 and every 10-watt channel that will sell you the Magic Bullet or lead you in prayer, they don't carry C-SPAN 3. I believe it would be free to them but they don't carry it.
The hearing ran 2 hours and 10 minutes and I've embedded below a player will run the whole thing, though you can zip ahead to when Mr. Colbert first spoke, which was about 56 minutes into the proceedings. He gave the opening statement embedded in the previous item here, then did follow-up questions and such intermittently thereafter…
Other sites will show you excerpts of just Colbert but if you're as intrigued as I was about just what he was doing there or what he was accomplishing — or even what he might have thought he was accomplishing — you kinda have to see a large chunk of the non-Colbert parts of the hearing. Then you can see how he does and does not fit in there. At times, he seems to not know why he's there or to be embarrassed he can't offer more substantive information. And at times, the various committee members seem divided among being amused or annoyed by his presence. He did make one good point at the end, which is that there's a glaring contradiction with how we treat illegal, undocumented workers. We ask them to come pick our tomatoes, then we ask them to get the hell out of our country. Those are my words, not his. The problem has always been that "we" (as defined by the loudest voices) want the benefits of having them here but not the responsibilities or costs…and no one is willing to address the matter on that basis.
I suppose that Colbert did some good in that he got some attention for an issue that many wish to demagogue but few wish to actually fix. But I don't see that he did anything that would get us closer to fixing it. Then again, probably nothing that happens these days before a Congressional subcommittee is going to get us any closer.