WATCH LIVE: Disgraced Jack Smith Faces Lion’s Den Over Trump

Jack Smith is back on Capitol Hill, and this time he's the one being asked questions. He spent years chasing President Trump, and along the way his team scooped up communications belonging to Republican lawmakers. Not staffers. Not aides. Sitting members of Congress. That detail gets lost in the noise, but it's the one that matters. That is not normal prosecutorial work. It is something you'd expect from a system that believes the end justifies the seizure.

The left largely shrugged when these records were collected. Smith was going after the big target, so collateral damage to a few GOP offices was written off as a cost of doing business. That's a dangerous habit. If a special counsel can pull the communications of elected representatives without consequence, the whole idea of separation of powers starts to feel like a formality. The committee's job today is to make sure it stops being a formality. Grassley deserves credit for holding this hearing at all, because the institutional instinct is to let this stuff slide and move on.

Smith will likely come armed with legal jargon and a practiced unwillingness to say anything real. That's fine. Let him dance. The point is to put his conduct on the record, under oath, where the American people can watch. He doesn't get to play victim here. He had the power. He used it aggressively. Now he has to explain why that didn't cross a line. If he can't, voters already know what that means.