Americans heading into the midterms are fed up about inflation, interest rates, and foreign wars — but Washington's laser stays locked on January 6, with former special counsel Jack Smith testifying Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Donald Trump's effort to challenge the 2020 election results.
The disconnect is the story. NBC News sent three reporters on a six-day road trip through some of the most competitive House and Senate districts in the country and found voters angry about rising prices, ballooning interest rates, and the threat that AI will wipe out jobs while driving up utility costs. Foreign wars also ranked high. Notably absent from the list of top concerns: the January 6 probe that has consumed years of congressional time and millions in taxpayer dollars.
You wouldn't know that from the Senate's schedule. Smith appears as the sole witness at a 9 a.m. hearing titled, in full, "Oversight of Jack Smith's Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters," according to the Washington Examiner. It marks his second time before a Republican-controlled committee, following a House appearance in January.
Smith has maintained that a jury would have convicted Trump in the election case had it gone to trial and has dismissed suggestions he was "influenced or directed by the Biden administration," NBC News reported. Senate Republicans plan to press him on those very claims of political weaponization.
NBC framed the voter-concerns finding as a lifestyle feature — its "Drive to Decision Day" packaged as a documentary and newsletter item — while slotting the Smith hearing alongside a Cornell University sexual-assault story in the same roundup. The Washington Examiner, by contrast, focused entirely on the Smith hearing and its framing as an accountability exercise, omitting any reference to what actual voters say they care about.
Neither outlet connected the two threads: voters are signaling one set of priorities, and the permanent political class is spending its time and their money on something else entirely. The hearing itself is an exercise in retrospective accountability — Smith's investigation already concluded without a trial — while the economic pressures voters named are compounding right now.
The open question is whether either party adjusts its spending and agenda to match what voters are demanding, or whether the next Congress simply reruns the same script with different chairs.
