Take a Seat

Take a Seat

July 27, 2026

During World War II, an eighteen-year-old from Boise left college and enlisted. The Army made him an intelligence officer and sent him to Burma, India, and China. He came home after the war, finished his degree, married his high school sweetheart, and started law school. 

Then he developed a backache that would not go away. Doctors found cancer and told him he had less than a year to live. The radiation treatments were painful and experimental. They worked, and he finished law school in 1950. He said afterward that surviving had settled something in him. He would take every chance that came his way. 

Frank Church reached the United States Senate at age thirty-two and stayed twenty-four years. He carried the Wilderness Act across the Senate floor and put stretches of American rivers beyond the reach of dams. During his fourth term he sat down at the head of a committee table and began investigating the secret intelligence world he had once served in as a young officer. 

His committee found files kept on Americans, detailing personal beliefs. A sustained campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. Surveillance of people who had broken no laws. Mail opened and read. 

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence. Written in 1948, the full text is etched in stone tablets at the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution had barred unreasonable searches since 1791. But declaring a right is only the first step. A right that is unprotected is just words on paper. 

In August 1975, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Church warned that technology already existed to make tyranny total in America. If it were ever turned on the American people, he said, there would be no way back — “the abyss from which there is no return.” 

Church did not stop at a warning. His committee ran for more than a year and left behind two things still standing today: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not a promise that the government would follow the law. Instruments for finding out whether it had. 

He did this inside a country that had stopped trusting its government. Pollsters have asked Americans since the 1950s whether Washington can be counted on to do what is right. Trust peaked in the mid-1960s at roughly three in four, then fell by half within a decade. Vietnam had been eroding trust for years. Watergate confirmed people’s suspicions.

Despite the dramatic drop in trust, the 1970s produced one of the most productive bursts of oversight lawmaking in American history, nearly all of it aimed at closing the gaps Church and his colleagues exposed. Distrust did not paralyze that generation; it gave them their assignment.

Congress strengthened the Freedom of Information Act over President Ford’s veto — the override was not close or partisan. The Inspector General Act planted auditors inside federal agencies with a mandate to report to Congress. The Ethics in Government Act required senior officials to write down what they owned, what they owed, and who had paid them, and made that information public. That same short stretch also produced the Federal Election Commission, the Sunshine Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, whistleblower protections, and the law making a president’s papers the country’s papers.

We name bright spots at the Wassmuth Center because they are instructive. This is one: people with every reason to be cynical made these instruments anyway, and they are still working. 

But some of the parts are going missing. The Inspector General Act requires a president who wants to remove an inspector general to notify Congress in writing a month ahead and to give detailed, case-specific reasons. On a Friday night in January of last year, seventeen inspectors general received a two-sentence email terminating them immediately, citing changing priorities. A federal judge later found that the firings had likely broken the law, then declined to reinstate the eight who had sued, concluding they could not show irreparable harm, and noting that the President could remove them lawfully anyway, simply by filing the notice. 

Senator Chuck Grassley, who helped write the requirement that those reasons be detailed and case-specific, did not let it pass. Within days of the firings, he and Senator Dick Durbin had written to the President together, asking for the rationale the law requires. No answer came. But the letter exists, in the record, with both their names on it. Oversight does not always win. It does leave a record, and the record is what the next person works from. 

A law that carries no consequence when it is broken remains merely words on paper. The distance between what is required and what is verified is widening again, and that is where corruption grows.

Which is why the question worth asking now is not “Do you trust the government?” The useful questions are more specific. Are the inspectors general independent, funded, and staffed? Are disclosures actually filed and enforced? Are records requests answered, or slow-walked into irrelevance? 

Every one of those questions has an answer. But someone has to ask them. 

Out in the Memorial, past the tablets where the Universal Declaration stands in full, there is a monument to Frank Church. Not a statue. Not a podium. Not a figure with his chin lifted. A writing table, at ordinary height — the kind of thing many of us have in our homes. A line of his is cut into the stone: “The best tool yet devised for improving society is freedom.” 

Devised. Not granted, not inherited. Worked out by people, written down, and carried out. 

And a tool is something you pick up and use. Freedom is not a condition we are in; it is an instrument we operate, and the operating is smaller and more ordinary than the word suggests.

One of the most consequential things Frank Church ever did, he did sitting down. He took a seat at the head of a committee table and started asking questions. The answers became laws, and the laws became working equipment: a committee that still meets, departments that still review, auditors who still report past their agency heads to Congress. So we remember Frank Church with a table. 

The year he was not supposed to survive taught him to take every chance. Sitting down at that table was one of them. He asked his questions at a moment when two of every three Americans had concluded the answers would not matter. He asked anyway.

There are tables everywhere. A city council chamber. A school board meeting. The office where a records request gets filed. Most of them have chairs that nobody sits in. Take a seat.