Alcee Hastings issue won't go away

Now that Nancy Pelosi is officially Speaker, she faces the tough choice of whom to appoint as Intelligence Committee chair, which the media is already starting to focus on:

Many Democrats are closely watching the decision for signs of two things: how the speaker-in-waiting will chart her party’s course on national security issues and how she will handle her first postelection test in dealing with the often fractious Democratic caucus.

“This is the battle that nobody wanted,” one senior Democratic strategist said. “For Nancy to start off her speakership with a fight is a great shame.”

As I've written (here and here), there is no way Pelosi should appoint Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who was removed from the bench by the Senate for bribery and perjury, as the new Intelligence chair. The problem is that she'll be in trouble with the powerful Congressional Black Caucus if she doesn't.

Meanwhile, Congressional Quarterly reports that Hastings' "expertise is otherwise uncontested." Maybe he does have the relevant substantive knowledge. But, as CQ notes, "Democrats and intelligence professionals" fear that Hastings "would become a lightning rod for the GOP," stalling "the already slow pace of reforming the spy agencies." No kidding. Will the Democrats recognize that this issue threatens to become the equivalent of gays in the military? Do they want Hastings to become a symbol of how the new Democratic majority is captive to its liberal base and not serious about national security?

Comments

[SomeCallMeTim]

Here's the thing:

1. It's not like there haven't been corrupt (and nearly overtly corrupt) chairmen of important committees before. The CBC might reasonably ask, "Would this be a big deal if he were white?" For cripes sake, Senator Allen narrowly lost an election in which there were credible (to me) allegations that he stuffed a deer's head into someone's mailbox. (I realize this isn't cleanly parallel.)

2. My recollection is that there was (and perhaps still is) widespread belief in the African-American community that, back in the day, the federal government focused on rooting out corrupt African-American politicians with a fervor it didn't show corrupt white politicians. (I don't know if this is true, but I would bet that people could make a reasonable case about this.) The CBC might ask, "Aren't there equally corrupt members of this Congress who would have been caught, but for the fact that they aren't black?"

3. To the extent this is an issue of optics, then the CBC might worry that this will usually play against African-American Congresspeople. Not for nothing, but the murderers row of scary Dems in power if the Dems won was something like Frank, Rangel, Conyers, Pelosi, (and maybe) Hastings. Or black, gay, and female. If they'd stuck someone Jewish on there (Schumer?), it would have been a Southern Strategy full house.

(NB: I'm not sure that's coherent, but the coffee hasn't kicked in yet.)

[Russ Allbery]

Uh, this is the Alcee Hastings whose impeachment was overturned and who was found not guilty in criminal court? Do you have some evidence that he's actually guilty despite our judicial process saying otherwise? Maybe you do, but I think you have to say it; just quoting Wikipedia doesn't really cut it.

(It may be that this all has an explanation for people who were following the saga at the time, but for those of us who haven't heard of Alcee Hastings before his name came up in this context, I think it requires at least some clear reasoning as to why, having been found innocent, he shouldn't be treated as such.)