Why Democrats have to play along with the GOP’s biggest waste of time

Nobody has ever accused the modern Republican Party of shying away from the dramatic. The House GOP caucus in particular has turned histrionics into an art form, honing its craft over years of horrifying symbiosis with conservative media. From that unending reservoir of dudgeon comes its latest affront to governance: two subcommittees designed to lend patinas of credibility to some of the right’s darkest conspiracies.

The innocuous-sounding “select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic” will be housed under the Oversight Committee. The much more aggressively named “select subcommittee on the weaponization...