This subjects most big projects to hearings and approval by many local officials, including the mayor and city council, and has often curbed bad plans.
The fiasco at the Congressional Big Three bailout hearings last week wasn't just that the CEOs couldn't figure out a way to jet pool there or horror of horrors drive one of their cars.
Unfortunately, there was a big group of hearing-impaired people in the audience that night who sat there watching a blank stage for five minutes.
The least gifted in speaking in their own defense, whether mumbling in shock or invoking the constitutional right not to answer the senator's baiting questions, were ordered back for the big show: the open hearings where the senator conducted a thunderous witch hunt that both mesmerized and polarized the nation in exploiting cold war fear.
Just a day before tech's big Russia-focused Congressional hearings begin, Google is out with a new report on the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election across its platforms.
Still, all of this, she says, "comes as a big shock" and further hearings on the matter are going to ensue, and Petraeus will be part of "the hearing process".
"But the chief justice has made it clear that he meant what he said in his confirmation hearings: The big decisions should be made by the people who won an election, whether the court agrees with them or not, as long the justices don't have to distort the law to do that," Strauss said.
In the last two weeks, the White House has rolled out its big guns at congressional hearings and private meetings to advocate for the deal, which Obama says is not perfect but is the best way to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
"It turned out that the trial was going to be bigger than the previous hearings and they didn't have enough desks.
