The alternative seems worse. If there's never punishment for lies every unscrupulous person called to testify will provide whatever is in their best interests instead of providing the truth.

Also, this particular case is about testifying to congress. It's not a criminal trial in a court of law.

I didn't think I was being particularly obtuse but you seem to have missed the point: Providing provably false answers to Congress as part of sworn testimony should trigger prosecutors to look into perjury charges. Perjury is what we are talking about here and that has a mechanism: the legal system.

Yes, I think that a C level executive who comes to Congress and testifies confidently about something his business does and is wrong about it should trigger a potential prosecution.

This is about testifying to Congress and what happens when you say something provably false as an expert under Oath. If you are not certain of what you are testifying about, do not testify to it. If you are certain and wrong, you should be afraid of repercussions. Anything else opens up Pandora's Box.

Well, in this case, it should trigger congress to look into it, but I agree. And we know that happens because congress has done so in the past. Such an initial investigation would certainly (and correctly) be done quietly, and we're not likely to know about it unless that investigation determines that perjury may have actually happened.

But it's still testimony given under oath. AFAIK perjury is still applicable under those circumstances.

It may seem like a small difference, but it's pretty large in practice.

> willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true

Intent (“willfully”) matters.

If you believe the statement is true when you say it, it isn’t perjury. It’s just incorrect.

Yes, but whether you believed the statement was true when you said is not just a matter of your saying so. Other evidence can be brought to bear on the question: for example, as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, asking you how you came to believe that what you said was true, and you either admitting that you just made it up or had no good reason to believe it, or giving obviously false or evasive answers, or answers that are rebutted by other evidence (for example, you say you were told it by someone who denies that they did so). That could lead a jury in a perjury trial to conclude that in fact you were wilfully lying, even though you deny it.