Via WaPo we find that Speaker-elect Pelosi will name neither Alcee Hastings nor Jane Harman to chair the House intelligence committee (Hastings, Harman Rejected for Chairmanship).
The piece does not say, however, who would be named. The LAT gives the following details: Hastings won’t chair intel panel, Pelosi says
In a written statement, Pelosi said she had met with Hastings and “advised him that I would select someone else as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.”Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who will become speaker when her party takes control of the House in January, did not explain why she was bypassing Hastings, the panel’s second-ranking Democrat. Her office has previously indicated that the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of Venice, will not be reappointed.
The whole situation with Hastings has reflected poorly on the Congressional Black Caucus. It is one thing to promote diversity, it is another to make race the main variable in a situation. Further, it isn’t as if there aren’t going to be prominent black chairs in the 110th–both John Conyers and Charlie Rangel come immediately to mind.
Indeed, the CBC’s relationship with Pelosi has been marred by two such situations–this one and their ire over Pelosi’s treatment of William Jefferson, he of cold hard cash fame (back to WaPo:
Complicating the matter was Pelosi’s relationship with black Democrats. Earlier this year, she enraged the Black Caucus by removing one of its members, Rep. William J. Jefferson (La.), from the Ways and Means Committee after court documents revealed that federal investigators looking into allegations of bribery had found $90,000 in cash neatly bundled in his freezer.
I would argue that just as we should not reject someone for a position because of race, we should similarly not give someone a pass because of their hue.
Despite Hastings being found innocent at trial, there remains a substantial cloud over his ethics that makes the recent campaign by the CBC to have him placed in the chair of the intelligence committee shameful:
He [Hastings] pointed repeatedly to his 1983 acquittal by a Miami jury and wrote that it is “amazing how little importance” his critics give that verdict. The events that followed that trial, he said, “are so convoluted, voluminous, complex and mundane that it would boggle the mind.”In fact, there is a certain simplicity in the conclusion drawn by an investigating committee of five eminent federal judges, each with strong civil rights credentials. Those judges, and later more than three dozen others, concluded that Hastings lied to the Miami jury as many as 15 times to win acquittal.
And there’s this:
When the Hastings case reached the House, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), skeptical about the evidence, investigated further. In time, Conyers, an African American, became so certain of Hastings’s guilt that he delivered an impassioned speech about race and justice — and made an opening statement during the Senate proceedings, which ended with Hastings’s conviction on 11 counts, including seven counts of making false statements.Sphere: Related Content“We did not wage that civil rights battle merely to replace one form of judicial corruption for another,” Conyers said in the House, which voted 413 to 3 to impeach Hastings.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Pelosi is starting to remind me more and more of Joe Reed, and that’s not a good thing.