Back in November, I made fun of my senator Amy Klobuchar whose major response to the FTX crypto scam was to focus on…the Ticketmaster snafu that annoyed Taylor Swift fans.

If you don’t go to Taylor Swift concerts as much as I do, you may have missed the national tragedy of the Great Ticketmaster Disaster, which caused thousands of Swifties to have difficulty buying tickets to her new concert tour. The website crashed from the crush of Swiftophiles, and a national outcry arose.

AKlo swiftly (get it?) went into gear, firing off a letter to Ticketmaster accusing them of being an evil monopoly.

Klobuchar, who has been especially outspoken in her criticism of the ticketing giant since the Swift ticketing debacle in October, spoke with Variety at length about the issues last month. “As they’ve said publicly, they should have done better on the Taylor Swift ticket sales. We know that, but we believe it’s not enough. I believe that we need to get to the bottom of the problems in the ticketing industry,” she said.

Don’t get me wrong, Ticketmaster IS an evil monopoly, and I would be fine if their merger with Live Nation Entertainment in 2010 had never happened, and fine if they were broken up. I just don’t think it made sense to focus on this at the moment the FTX scandal was heating up. In fact, if there is a problem with the Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly, the DOJ should be asked to look into it and present a report, or even file suit in federal court. It really doesn’t merit a lick of time in the Senate.

Well, apparently Dick Durban, the Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary in the United States Senate agrees with his colleague AKlo more than me, since the very first hearing of the Committee will be on the crisis in concert tickets. Swifties are vindicated!

It will be a whole show, and even has a name: That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment

AKlo: 1; David Strom: 0

I promise to shake it off though. (I really do love that song). I am used to losing important battles.

Amy Klobuchar’s focus on this issue captures something important about her and many other politicians: they are profoundly unserious people.

I am proud of how I described Amy Klobuchar in my November column on this subject. I think it captured her to a T:

Amy’s real superpower is a kind of policy vapidity. She isn’t a leader who takes on the big issues, and while she is personally very ambitious it is hard to see why. She doesn’t want to achieve great things; she just wants to be greatly powerful without purpose.

That’s why her latest crusade is a perfect metaphor for Klobuchar’s career, and a warning sign for Democrats who still see her as a viable candidate for president should Joe Biden and Kamala Harris implode over the next two years. And I still believe they are likely to do so, because whatever surface success they have had politically, it will be unlikely to be matched with any real world success.

Of all the issues facing America at this time, it is difficult to imagine something this trivial being worthy of a hearing in the United States Senate. There are allegations–actually, there is proof–of FBI wrongdoing, DOJ bias, and civil rights violations at government-funded colleges and universities. Yet none of those bear consideration, because there was a Taylor Swift ticket crisis two months ago.

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary chose this issue above all others as the focus of its attention, placing it first on the agenda.

As I was growing up the Senate was commonly referred to as “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” usually in stentorian tones reserved for the voice of God.

What crap. It is just one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. Joe Biden was a Senator, for God’s sake. Strom Thurmond was 100 years old when he left the Senate and was hardly doing much deliberation while he was there. Congress as a whole does little these days other than spend ungodly amounts of money. Doing oversight on concert ticket sales is heavy lifting, I guess.

Congress was supposed to be the strongest of the 3 branches of government, as representatives of the people and the 50 states. Now it is for the most part a shell. It still has a say in some appointments that matter, particularly the Supreme Court (the Judiciary Committee, now Ticketmaster central, plays the most important role there), and of course oversight. But since the Democrats run the Senate they will studiously avoid doing any real oversight of the Executive Branch and rubber stamp any judicial appointments.

The US Senate has devolved to become much the same as the Roman Senate late in the time of the Empire: of symbolic value, but with little real relevance in most cases. It has ceded power to the Executive in most matters that count and has less energy to fight for its prerogatives than the more boisterous House of Representatives. Senators can be powerful, but mostly over small matters.

So perhaps Amy Klobuchar is the perfect Senator: vapid, obsessed with personal power and glory, and mean-spirited in private while playing to the crowd.