Fifteen Hundred Hours to Cut Hair, and No Requirement at All to Ask a Question

Question: How stupid can a person be and still be elected to the United States Senate from Missouri?

Answer: Stupider than Eric Schmitt, and that is the interesting part, because he is not stupid. The interesting part is that nothing in the law required him to be anything at all.

On Tuesday, September 29, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters” (Senate Judiciary Committee, 2026). A hearing that names its conclusion in the title is not an inquiry, and this one proceeded accordingly. Missouri’s junior senator spent his question time building an accusation of perjury against the former special counsel, and the accusation collapsed in public, on the record, within the same seven minutes in which it was made.

The story has been told well and at length, so I will keep to its skeleton. Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended a February 2024 game in Atlanta between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors, on the theory that it placed him in the city on the eve of the Fulton County racketeering prosecution of Donald Trump. He told the witness, “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff. So I’ll give you a second to process it, so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself” (Beitsch, 2026). Staff displayed a poster of text messages about a reserved seat, laid over a photograph of the Atlanta Hawks’ arena (Blake, 2026). Smith said he had no recollection of being in Atlanta. Schmitt called him a “dirtbag,” and closed by telling him, “You may think you’re a hero in this story, but let me tell you something. You’re the villain” (Beitsch, 2026).

Then Smith remembered where he had been. Not an Atlanta Hawks game. The University of Iowa Hawkeyes, women’s basketball, at the University of Maryland in College Park, on February 3, 2024, a game featuring Caitlin Clark (Blake, 2026). Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who evidently knew her Midwestern sports, read the result into the record: “We have confirmed that, in fact, you are right, Mr. Smith. The Iowa Hawkeyes played Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024. The final score was 93 to 85. Iowa won, and Caitlin Clark scored 30 points, so it must have been a pretty good game. The game was, in fact, in Maryland” (Beitsch, 2026).

Three letters separate the two names. One team plays in an arena in Georgia, and the other plays in Iowa City.

What Missouri asks of a person who cuts hair

The state of Missouri licenses barbers and cosmetologists through the Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners, in the Division of Professional Registration. The requirements are set by statute and are not shy about hours.

The barber figures are in the Revised Statutes of Missouri at 328.080, which requires the thousand hours of schooling or the two thousand hours of apprenticeship, along with freedom from contagious disease and “sufficient knowledge of the common diseases of the face and skin to avoid the aggravation and spread thereof in the practice of barbering” (RSMo 328.080). The cosmetologist’s fifteen hundred hours appear at 329.040, and the statute does not stop at the total. It itemizes the curriculum: forty hours of shampooing, one hundred thirty of hair coloring, one hundred twenty-five of permanent waving and relaxing, two hundred twenty-five of hairsetting, pin curls, fingerwaves and thermal curling, one hundred five of combouts and hair styling techniques, and ten hours of state law (RSMo 329.040).

Ten hours of state law, to hold a pair of scissors in Missouri. It is the smallest line item in the schedule and the one worth pausing over. The state has decided that a person who will cut a citizen’s hair should receive no fewer than ten hours of instruction in the law that governs the work, and should demonstrate that knowledge on an examination, and should renew a license every two years, and should post it in front of the working chair where every patron can see it.

The last row of the table has no hours in it. It has an age.

A person may be elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty, and no institution in Missouri or anywhere else may require anything further of them. The Constitution sets exactly three qualifications for the office, in Article I, Section 3, clause 3, and the Supreme Court has twice held that nobody may add to them. In Powell v. McCormack, the House of Representatives was forbidden to refuse a seat to a duly elected member who met them (Powell v. McCormack, 1969). A quarter of a century later, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, the Court held that Arkansas could not impose term limits on its own congressional delegation, and it gave the reason in the language of the founding: the qualifications are fixed, and the principle underneath them is “that the people should choose whom they please to govern them” (U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 1995).

So the empty cell is not an oversight. It is a design decision, and a defensible one: the Framers made the Senate’s gate deliberately low, and put the real examination in the hands of the electorate rather than in the hands of a licensing board. Missouri will not let a man trim a beard without a thousand hours of instruction, and it is constitutionally forbidden to ask a single question of the man who votes on war. That asymmetry sounds like a joke. It is instead a statement about where the country decided the competence of a senator ought to be judged.

It is judged here. By us. That is the whole remainder of the system.

What actually failed on Tuesday

It would be satisfying to file this under stupidity and close the drawer. The frame has one problem, which is the résumé.

Eric Schmitt graduated from DeSmet Jesuit High School and from Truman State University, and earned his law degree at Saint Louis University. He was admitted to the Missouri bar in 2000 and practiced as a partner at Lathrop & Gage. He served in the Missouri Senate, then as state treasurer, then as attorney general of Missouri, and in 2022 he won a Senate seat with 55.4 percent of the vote (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). A man who has passed a state bar examination has demonstrated more instruction in state law than the ten hours the cosmetologist must take, and has faced a harder examination for it.

Which means the failure was not a shortage of intelligence. It was a shortage of something cheaper, more common, and entirely within his control: verification before accusation.

The most revealing detail in the whole episode is not in the hearing transcript. It is in the reporting. A source familiar with how Schmitt arrived at the claim told CNN that the senator’s staff checked which men’s college and NBA games were scheduled that night, found the Atlanta Hawks game, and never considered that the witness might have attended a women’s basketball game (Blake, 2026). That is it. That is the entire investigation, and its shape is familiar to anyone who has ever shipped a citation without opening the link. The evidence was real: a text message about a seat being reserved, and a picture of an arena. It pointed at a game. Nobody asked which one.

The date did not hold still either. Schmitt’s own retellings put the game on February 2 (Mancini, 2026) and on February 3, which is the date his exhibit carried. A fact that moves when the person asserting it is questioned is not a fact that was checked.

The defense, examined

Schmitt has defended the line of questioning in the days since, and the defenses are worth taking seriously, because each of them is a claim about what a senator owes a witness and a public.

“My job is to ask the questions, and his job is to answer the questions” (Mancini, 2026). This is accurate about roles and false about duties. It asserts that the burden of accuracy rests entirely on the person answering, which means a senator may accuse a citizen of a federal crime, on the record, at a hearing held by the committee on which he sits, and bear no cost if the accusation is wrong. Consider the same sentence in the rooms where Missouri does impose a standard. A barber who says “my job is to cut the hair, and the customer’s job is to say what he wants” has not thereby earned the right to decide where the part goes. The professional norm in every licensed trade in this state is that you look before you act, and that the person who does the work carries the consequence.

“It’s not a mistake” (Mancini, 2026). He said this to a reporter on the street who asked how the mix-up happened. It is the most consequential sentence of the week, because everything else can be read as a bad morning, and this cannot. A man who has understood that he was wrong about the central exhibit of his own questioning has two sentences available to him, and this was the other one.

“Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” (Blake, 2026). Read closely, this is a confession with a laugh track. The sentence concedes that the alibi was true, and then relocates the conversation to a joke about the fact he got wrong. A senator with a defensible line of inquiry does not need the joke. I will admit the joke was good. It was the best line of the hearing, and it was the best line because it was an admission.

Two honest corrections to my own frame

The first is about Schmitt, and the second is about us.

Schmitt was not a lone incompetent in a competent room. He was the most vivid instance of a method the whole majority was practicing that day. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked the witness whether he believed in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Senator Ted Cruz compared him to Javert. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, seated at the same dais, repeated a perjury allegation that had already been publicly rebutted months earlier, and moved on when Smith answered it (Blake, 2026). Missouri sent two senators to that table, and they arrived with the same premise and the same missing exhibit. The Hawks and Hawkeyes mix-up is the one that will be remembered because it is the funniest, and because a fact could be produced to settle it: a box score, a photograph, and a Minnesota senator who does her homework. The others simply had no such clean refutation available, which is a distinction about the facts and not about the method.

The second correction is less comfortable. The same failure by a senator of the other party would have been covered differently by a good share of the press, and laughed at differently by a good share of the country. That is a fact about the audience, and it is the more important one, because the audience is the only check this office has. A reader who is delighted by this column because of the party of the man involved has just demonstrated the mechanism that produced the column.

What would fix it

Not a licensing examination. The Court in Thornton forbade it, and a competence test for the people who elect senators would be a far worse idea than the disease it treats. The remedy is not a credential. It is a habit, and the habit is the one the state already imposes on everyone else who holds a citizen’s interest in their hands. Verify before you act. In the Senate, where no statute can require it, the only enforcement is at the ballot, and the voter cannot enforce what the voter cannot see.

Which is why the plain naming of it matters. This site’s own rulebook carries a rule against exactly this failure, written for exactly this reason: a claim attributed to a source that does not contain it looks checkable and is not, and the wrong citation is more damaging than the missing one, because it looks like evidence. The rule was written for writers, and it turns out to describe a senator asking a question on national television. The scale is different; the error is identical in kind.

Missouri asks ten hours of state law from a woman who shampoos hair. The Senate asks nothing of the man who asks the questions, and never will, because that blank cell in the table is the country’s deliberate answer about where judgment belongs. It belongs here.

So the answer to the question at the top is not a number of hours. It is this: a senator from Missouri may be exactly as ignorant as the voters will tolerate, and no more, and no less. Schmitt’s résumé says he should have known better. The Constitution says he did not have to. Both are true at once, and the reason this episode stung is that the voters did not have to be caught off guard either, and were.

The examination is open, and it does not run on the senator’s schedule. Schmitt’s name is not on the ballot five weeks from now. His turn comes in 2028, when the voters who are entitled to remember this have had two years in which to do it.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman

Sources

• Senate Judiciary Committee, 2026. Full Committee Hearing, “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” September 29, 2026, Hart Senate Office Building Room 216.
• Blake, 2026. Aaron Blake, “An embarrassing moment for the GOP, a confident witness and other takeaways from Jack Smith’s hearing,” CNN, September 29, 2026.
• Beitsch, 2026. Rebecca Beitsch, “Schmitt faces fallout after debunked Jack Smith narrative,” The Hill, September 30, 2026.
• Mancini, 2026. Ryan Mancini, “Schmitt on mix-up at Jack Smith hearing: ‘My job is to ask questions,’” The Hill, September 30, 2026.
• RSMo 328.080. Missouri Revised Statutes, “Application for licensure, fee, examination, qualifications: approval of schools,” effective August 28, 2018.
• RSMo 329.040. Missouri Revised Statutes, “Schools of cosmetology: license requirements, application, form: hours required for student cosmetologists, nail technicians and estheticians,” effective August 28, 2018.
• Powell v. McCormack, 1969. Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).
• U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 1995. U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995).
• U.S. Senate, 2026. “Constitution of the United States,” Art. I, § 3, cl. 3 (the qualifications for Senator). United States Senate.
• Wikipedia contributors, 2026. “Eric Schmitt,” Wikipedia, retrieved September 30, 2026.