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And when will we hear you say which time that you were?

By Moe Lane Posted in Congress — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Today's Oh-Dear-God-Please-No reaction on the Left to their Speaker-designate's management style comes to us from Salon.com (HT RCP):

Nov. 24, 2006 | Whatever urge impels Nancy Pelosi to consider replacing Jane Harman with Alcee Hastings as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence must be extraordinarily powerful. Some say that Speaker-elect Pelosi harbors a personal grudge against her fellow Californian; some say that she feels Harman has been too accommodating to the White House and Republicans as the ranking Democrat on the committee, known as HPSCI (or "hip-see").

Yet neither of those motives seems sufficient to explain why Pelosi would choose to pass over Harman in favor of Hastings, whose elevation can only cause the most severe embarrassment to the speaker-elect and the Democrats she leads. It won't be easy for them to justify entrusting a position of such enormous sensitivity to someone whom Pelosi -- and many of her Democratic colleagues -- once voted to impeach and remove from the federal bench as a corrupt perjurer.

Read on.

A fun wrinkle to all of this - and one that really should be brought up more - is this: guess who was in charge of impeaching Hastings in the first place? Don't be surprised if you don't remember, as he keeps it kind of quiet:

The Doar report convinced members of the House Judiciary Committee -- then controlled by Democrats and chaired by John Conyers, D-Mich., who is now set to chair the committee again -- to begin the impeachment process. Their decision was historic because Hastings was the first African-American federal judge in Florida, and only the sixth judge ever to be impeached by Congress. The committee unanimously referred to the full House the 17 specific articles against him, which were then ratified on the House floor by a vote of 413-3. Conyers led the special committee of impeachment managers who prosecuted Hastings in the Senate, where they won his conviction and removal. Of the 17 counts, he was convicted on nine and acquitted on two, and the Senate didn't vote on six; each conviction required a two-thirds vote.

[bolding mine]

That's right, good old John "Let's impeach the President!" Conyers - who is, by the way, going to be another disaster-in-waiting for the Democrats, but never mind that now. Bryon York went to check with Conyers' office about how he felt about the situation now; got... well, I'll let Mr. York say:

Given all that, will Hastings make it to the chairman’s seat? It’s not clear. When National Review got in touch with Rep. Conyers’s office to ask whether Conyers believes today, as he did in 1988 and 1989, that Hastings was guilty, a spokesman made no comment except to send along two newspaper articles from the late 1990s about problems and irregularities at the FBI laboratory. One of those problems concerned an FBI agent who allegedly testified falsely about some peripheral evidence in the Hastings case. The stories quoted then-FBI Director Lewis Freeh saying he would support re-opening the Hastings impeachment matter.

Does that mean Conyers now believes the Hastings impeachment was illegitimate and should not play a role in evaluating Hastings for the Intelligence Committee chairmanship? Or that the impeachment case should be re-examined? Or that Hastings was innocent? A spokesman for Conyers did not answer NR’s inquiries.

Hastings has always maintained his innocence of all the charges against him. But the record is what it is, and it’s fair to say that most people who have studied the case believe Hastings was guilty. Now, of course, the question is, should a man who was found guilty of impeachable offenses be entrusted with the nation’s most sensitive intelligence secrets? It’s a question Nancy Pelosi would undoubtedly prefer not to answer. But it’s not going away.

Nope. It's not. This stuff matters, because now what the Democratic Party does has an immediate and measurable impact. They aren't on the outside looking in and throwing spitballs; they're on the inside looking out and realizing that now they will be judged on how they do things. And you'd think that a Party that has just been apparently so decidedly validated by the American people would show just a touch more political courage when it comes to answering uncomfortable questions.

Actually, strike out everything after 'courage' and it'd still be a valid observation.