Ruth Marcus has a piece up over at the Washington Post that should be a must read for those who don't know who Alcee Hastings is and why people remember his name unfavorably. The reason is that Nancy Pelosi took time off from thinking about what she'll do in the first one hundred nanoseconds of her Rule Of The Iron Fist™ (or something like that) to decree that She would strictly follow seniority for appointing committee chairs. That means that the House Intelligence committee chair would go to Hastings. Why? Because Nancy Pelosi does not believe Jane Harman is sufficiently partisan.
If Democrats win control of the House next week, Nancy Pelosi's first test as speaker will arrive long before the 110th Congress convenes. Her choice to head the House intelligence committee — unlike other House committees, this one is left entirely up to the party leadership — will speak volumes about whether a Speaker Pelosi will be able to resist a return to paint-by-numbers Democratic Party interest-group politics as usual.
Pelosi is in a box of her own devising. The panel's ranking Democrat is her fellow Californian Jane Harman — smart and hardworking but also abrasive, ambitious and, in Pelosi's estimation, insufficiently partisan on the committee. So Pelosi, once the intelligence panel's ranking Democrat herself, has made clear that she doesn't intend to name Harman to the chairmanship.
The wrong decision, in my view, but one that's magnified by the unfortunate fact that next in line is Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings. In 1989, after being acquitted in a criminal trial, Hastings was stripped of his position as a federal judge — impeached by the House in which he now serves and convicted by the Senate — for conspiring to extort a $150,000 bribe in a case before him, repeatedly lying about it under oath and manufacturing evidence at his trial.
Ordinarily, that might doom Hastings's chances, but the situation is further inflamed by racial politics: Hastings is African American, and the Congressional Black Caucus has made it clear that it will not tolerate his rejection. Another black lawmaker, Georgia's Sanford Bishop, was passed over to accommodate Harman, who reclaimed her seniority when she returned to Congress in 2000 after a gubernatorial run. And the black caucus is still smarting over Pelosi's move to oust Louisiana's William J. Jefferson from the Ways and Means Committee after the FBI found a freezerful of cash in Jefferson's home.
There are a lot of egos involved here. But the fact is Hastings did what is very nearly impossible. He got himself removed from the Federal bench. I remember the ruckus but really hadn't remembered the details. Marcus helpfully reminds everyone why he was found guilty by the Senate:
The evidence against Hastings is circumstantial, but it's too much to explain away: a suspicious pattern of telephone calls between Hastings and Borders at key moments in the case; Borders's apparent insider knowledge of developments in the criminal case; Hastings's appearance at a Miami hotel, as promised by Borders as a signal that the judge had agreed to the payoff; a cryptic telephone conversation between the two men that appears to be a coded discussion of the bribe arrangement.
Consider: Hastings, a federal judge, gets word from Borders's lawyer that Borders has been arrested for conspiring to bribe him and that the FBI wants to interview him. Instead of calling the FBI agents whose names and numbers he's been given, Hastings leaves his hotel without checking out and heads to the airport outside Baltimore instead of National, where there's an earlier flight. At BWI, Hastings calls his girlfriend, has her call him back at a different pay phone, then asks her to leave the house to call him from a pay phone, then calls her back from a different pay phone. He doesn't speak to the FBI until they track him down at the girlfriend's house later that night.
If somehow the Democrats do win the House, something I am not at all sure they were going to do even before John "Geeze, I wish this was a magic helmet" Kerry "helped" them yesterday, the first act of the Pelosi regime will be to elevate this man to a chairmanship.
And people really think things will be better with Pelosi and company in charge? Really?
