This week, Representative Pramila Jayapal became our Chief Eviscerator.

Representative Pramila Jayapal is on a streak. In the past two days, the Washington Democrat has orchestrated two of the most memorable exchanges in two separate House hearings. In the first, he exposed the racism and political motivations behind Attorney General William Barr’s attacks on Portland protesters. In the second, he caught Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a series of lies about Facebook’s business practices.

During Barr de Jayapal’s interrogation on Tuesday, the attorney general tried to dispute that law enforcement officers used tear gas to disperse protesters for the president’s photo shoot near Lafayette Square in June. Authorities admitted using chemical eye irritants in the attack on protesters, but Barr said Tuesday, “Tear gas is a particular compound” that was not used. Jayapal stood firm. “I’m starting to lose my temper,” she said, after he refused to broach the bottom of the question for the third or fourth time.

Barr also attempted to defend the deployment of federal agents to nullify the racial justice protests in Portland under the guise of protecting a federal building. Meanwhile, she denied ever hearing of armed protesters in Michigan who, demanding an end to stay-at-home orders, broke into the state capitol and threatened to lynch Governor Gretchen Whitmer in May. Jayapal noted the disparity in its responses to these two groups of protesters. When Barr tried to interrupt her to tell her that he only cared about protests affecting federal property, Jayapal interrupted him. “This is my time and I control it,” he said. She continued:

When protesters carry Confederate and Swastika flags and weapons and ask the Michigan Governor to be beheaded, shot and lynched, they somehow don’t realize that … because they are making the President’s personal agenda. But when blacks and people of color protest police brutality, systemic racism, and the president’s own lack of response to those critical problems, then he forcibly removes them with armed federal officers, pepper bombs, because the president has consider terrorists.

Unlike his fellow Democrats, who effectively questioned Barr about racism within the police forces and his fanaticism about voting by mail, Jayapal did not register Barr with any particularly damning statements. But his line of questions offered more than the satisfaction of a good burn and the pleasure of seeing a fair legislator wield his power over a man who routinely abuses his own. Most people do not have the time or inclination to see long hearings in Congress. If there’s big news, they’ll read the headlines or watch clips on their nightly news shows, but much of the essence of these audiences often goes unnoticed. Reacting to Barr’s outrageous detours with the scandal they justified, Jayapal made sure it made headlines. Then, he gave viewers and readers a concrete example of the racist hypocrisy of the Trump administration, in clearly clear language. Unlike Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in a speech on Tuesday that “anarchists should be prosecuted,” leading some progressives to argue that Trump and Biden are “two sides of the same coin.” He focused the blame where it belonged: not on political dissidents, but on state entities trying to violently repress them.

His line of questions offered more than just the satisfaction of a good burn.

On Wednesday, Jayapal appeared again in the spotlight. The antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives summoned the giants of the technological world: Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple, to answer questions about their anti-competitive business practices. Jayapal began his cross-examination of Zuckerberg by citing emails and statements from multiple Facebook executives, including the CEO himself, who said that Facebook should prevent competitors from gaining traction in the market and copy its products if necessary. Then she asked, “Has Facebook ever taken steps to prevent competitors from establishing themselves by copying competitors?”

Zuckerberg dodged it. So she rephrased: “Since March 2012, after that email conversation, how many competitors did Facebook end up copying?” “Congressman, I can’t give you a number of companies,” replied Zuckerberg.

After Zuckerberg said he couldn’t recall any conversation in which he would have threatened to copy competing products if they didn’t let Facebook take over their businesses, Jayapal read aloud the quotes from an online chat transcript that showed Zuckerberg doing exactly that, in a conversation with the founder of Instagram. “Facebook is a case study, in my opinion, in monopoly power, because your company harvests and monetizes our data, and then your company uses that data to spy on competitors and copy, acquire and kill rivals,” he said. Jayapal. “These tactics reinforce Facebook’s dominance, which is then used in increasingly destructive ways.”

These hearings are not trials. In some cases, their public value is largely theatrical: the bigwigs who are called to declare coverage and loss, while members of Congress pontificate from their seats, putting on a show for their constituents. Wednesday’s audience fits this mold. The antitrust subcommittee had already been investigating these companies for over a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews and collecting more than 1 million documents. At the hearing, the members did not extract much new information. Their main job was to make public the information they already had, and make their constituents concerned. And Jayapal has proven remarkably adept at fusing performance with substance.

If there ever was any illusion that elected officials in this pseudo-democracy could trust the laws that govern it, the events of the past few years should have extinguished that hope. Corporations and powerful politicians will not monitor themselves, and many members of Congress will not risk angering the donor class unless there is a public outcry that warrants it. Jayapal not only caught Zuckerberg in a defensive stance on Facebook’s unwarranted consolidation of power in the tech industry. She laid the groundwork for the rest of the United States to understand what Facebook has been doing, understand the cynicism of Zuckerberg’s self-exoneration attempt, and connect the dots between Facebook’s anti-competitive strategies and its role in the erosion of American democracy. If Democrats in Congress hope to garner popular support to break or impose stricter regulations on monopolies like Facebook, they will need people like Jayapal, which represents a district where many Amazon employees live, to sell to the public about the urgency of the problem.

There is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity.

Jayapal’s week of burns comes immediately after another remarkable show of strength in the Chamber. Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the floor of the House and addressed her Republican colleague, Rep. Ted Yoho, who called her a “fucking bitch” in front of an audience of journalists. She received a lot of approval (and deserved) the press coverage of her speech, in which she called on Republicans who used their wives and daughters as shields against misogyny allegations. Some would reject quotes, passionate and made for television like his, and heated exchanges like those in Jayapal, as scathing criticism of little concrete political importance. But there is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity. It provides people who haven’t paid much attention with an accessible explanation of why they should be concerned and the language they need to explain it to others.

It also gives many of us a worthy representation of our impotent anger, transforming feelings of powerlessness into those of power. Yoho insists that he said shitno female dogand, moreover, he says, Ocasio-Cortez deserved it; Zuckerberg insists that the threat he delivered to Instagram was not a threat at all. It is enough to make any rational and outraged observer wonder if he is going crazy, and yet here are two members of Congress who firmly assure him that he is not. It is a formidable prophylactic against political apathy to see one’s fury at seemingly uncontrolled injustices expressed on a public stage by an elected official. It is representative democracy at work.