Enough to make you sigh.
The peerless Glenn Greenwald has a post up on his site about the real shortcomings of Rep. Jane Harman as House intel committee chair and the chorus of ‘serious centrists’ speaking up in her favor. He concludes thusly …
That’s why the media has taken such an intense interest in the otherwise mundane matter of who will be House Majority Leader and House Intelligence Chair. Jane Harman, like Steny Hoyer, is the symbol of official Washington, the broken, rotted, corrupt Washington that propped up this war and enabled this administration in so many ways. Pelosi has to prove that she’s one of them, or else suffer the consequences of being mauled and scorned.
If this were only about Iraq, I might agree. But it’s not. You cannot ignore the fact that the two people who opposed Hoyer and Harman were two people surrounded by ethical clouds just after the Democrats won an historic election in which congressional corruption was one of the two main issues.
Let me add a few other points.
First, I should say that the issues surrounding Murtha are qualitatively different from those with Hastings. Murtha’s an old style pork barrel politician who’s played the congressional appropriations game up to the edge and maybe gone over it. There’s good reason to believe that Hastings accepted a cash bribe to turn a case when he was a federal judge. Those are just two totally different things.
But for the purposes of considering who should get top posts in the new Democratic Congress, I think they’re both sufficient to merit serious consideration and pause.
Second, notwithstanding the fact that I started a site called TPMmuckraker and much of my work over the last couple years has focused on corruption, I don’t think of myself as a ‘good government’ type, at least not in the sense in which I sometimes take it or view it in a semi-perjorative sense.
I don’t think, expect or really even want everybody in politics to be squeaky clean. I think complete disinterestedness can become a fetish that distracts from the core concern of having representatives advocate and attend to the needs of their constituents on an equal basis. But we’re far, far from the point where rooting out crooks has gone so far as to make effective law-making difficult or onerous. So, really, let’s give some due to one of the issues that made the Democratic victory possible — opposing political corruption and having a low tolerance for crooks who sell out the folks they’re supposed to represent.
As far Alcee Hastings and Jane Harman, as long as you set aside the seniority principle, why limit the field to just these two? They’re the ones who have factional juice behind them, yes. But the blogosphere has shown it can at least put others into contention. There is after all, another member of the committee who used to work at the State Department monitoring nuclear weapons in North Korea, Iraq and the former Soviet Union and is also trained as a nuclear physicist. That’s Rep. Rush Holt (D) from New Jersey. Given our current focus on proliferation, those seem like decent qualifications for the gig.
Finally, I think Kevin Drum makes some good on-point comments on this whole House intel chair brouhaha: “There’s also seems to be more than a whiff of retribution here against any Democrat who supported the war resolution, and that strikes me as pretty counterproductive. After all, nearly half the Democratic caucus supported the resolution, and we really don’t want to declare every one of these folks persona non grata on all issues related to national security. ”
Early insight on the Iraq War is a legitimate point of pride and a good indication of immunity to getting played. But early opposition can’t be a litmus test for the Democratic caucus now. If nothing else, doing so would simply proscribe too much of the caucus.
The one point I wholeheartedly agree on is that the last thing anybody who has any say in how the Democratic Caucus is run should do is take any advice or counsel from the folks who run the Post oped page or their ilk.
