Suggestion: Perhaps that provision’s less to weed out hard questions than to weed out frivolous ones. Let’s suppose that Debbie were Sarah Palin. (Let’s do it for Debbie, because at this point I suspect she lacks the empathy to do it herself.) People are, as noted, paying the gov good money to speak at events which even under the loosest scheduling conditions have a finite amount of time available. Perhaps Debbie as Sarah would prefer to spend the entire question time discussing whether that’s really her kid, or whether she can see Russia from Wasilla, or the like, rather than more substantive political matters. For some reason, I doubt it.