Incoming Speaker Pelosi has now stated that she will not nominate disgraced former judge Alcee Hastings to the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The fact that Pelosi was even considering nominating someone who had been removed from the federal judiciary for bribe-taking was hardly a sign of great wisdom on her part.

Pelosi is refusing to renominate Rep. Jane Harman to the position despite the fact that she’s arguably the best candidate for the job. Her support for the war in Iraq (support shared by a significant fraction of the Democratic caucus at the time) has made her radioactive with the cut-and-run wing of the Democratic Party. Instead, Pelosi seems likely to nominate the next most ranking member of the HSCI, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas. Despite Rep. Reyes having been a former member of the US Border Patrol, he’s firmly on the side of an open US border. Reyes also voted against the recent Military Commissions Act and other key national security bills.

It will be interesting to see what the ramifications of this will be. The Congressional Black Caucus had been strongly pushing for Hastings, and Pelosi either offered them some kind of quid pro quo or told them to stuff it. Either way, the CBC is not going to be happy with this. Pelosi’s not a good leader, and even a good leader would have a tough time keeping the Democratic caucus in line — herding cats would be much easier. Getting rid of Hastings is unquestionably good news all around, but Pelosi’s likely to pay some political price for it. What that price may be will depend on how willing the CBC is to play ball with her. If she can’t keep them on her side, she’s going to have a lot of trouble over the next two years.

Newt Gingrich is proposing ditching McCain-Feingold and the system of limiting campaign contributions in general. Instead, anyone can give any amount to anyone, but each contribution must be available online within 24 hours.

It’s a sensible alternative to the current messy system of campaign finance rules. As it stands, McCain-Feingold restricts political speech while at the same time creating loopholes for irresponsible 527 groups and others. McCain-Feingold simply doesn’t work, and its ultimate goal of removing monied interests from politics in impossible without destroying the most important kind of speech in a democracy.

What we need is more transparency and accountability. Everyone plays by the same rules, and every voter can see who has given, when, and how much. The reality of the current system is that those who want to buy a politician merely have to go through some extra hoops to do so, and there’s no way of fixing it without dramatically curtailing the right of voters to support the candidates and issues of their choosing. So why bother with restrictions when transparency will ensure that groups like MoveOn.org or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth don’t get to play by less restrictive rules than the ostensibly more responsible political parties.

The Founders made it clear in The Federalist 10 that it is impossible to remove faction from government, and the surest cure for faction is not by restricting speech but by embracing freedom of speech. It’s a lesson that Gingrich seems to have learned as a history professor. It’s too bad that so few lawmakers don’t seem to understand it.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) is taking fire from left-wing bloggers for daring to run against former impeached judge Alcee Hastings for head of the House Intelligence Committee.

So, we have a group of left-wing bloggers, including notorious partisan hack Glenn Greenwald (whose contradictory logic gets nailed by Maguire at the bottom of the post) attacking another Democrat for running against someone who has been convicted of bribery and removed from office. Not only that, but the Democrats have the sheer audacity to put that individual in a position where he would be able to access some of this nation’s most sensitive secrets.

As tempting as it would be to watch the Democratic Party tear itself apart, the fact that someone with the record of Hastings might be the head of a crucial House committee during a time of war is not just disturbing, but downright frightening.

McCain’s presidential campaign Exploratory Committee site has video and transcripts of his speech to GOPAC yesterday. McCain was, as typical, brutally honest:

Hypocrisy, my friends, is the most obvious of political sins. And the people will punish it. We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. Then we lavished money, in a time of war, on thousands of projects of dubious, if any, public value. We responded to a problem facing some Americans by providing every retired American with a prescription drug benefit, and adding another trillion dollars to a bankrupt entitlement. We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office. And the people punished us. We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first.

McCain is certainly right on that. The left is naturally spinning the results of the miderms as an ideological repudiation of conservatism: but that isn’t borne out by the evidence. What is borne out by the exit polls is that the American people are sick and tired of business as usual in Congress. The Republican Party used to be the party of limited government, but after too many years in the comfortable majority we lost those values.

I remain skeptical about McCain — in 2000 he showed that he didn’t the right mentality to make it in Presidential politics. In recent months, he’s shown a new side of himself. His speech at GOPAC was very well crafted, and very much in the style of Reagan. He still has a long climb ahead of him before conservatives can really get behind him, but he is right on the way in which the GOP has lost its direction. If 2008 is as much about clean government as 2006 was, McCain is unquestionably one of the strongest candidates on that issue.

If the GOP wants to win, they have to get back to their values. Electing Trent Lott as Minority Leader in the Senate and John Boehner in the House (although to a lesser extent with Boehner) was not the right way to do that. The GOP has to decide whether they want to lose at politics as usual or embrace the values that swept them into office in the first place. McCain is right, the GOP lost not because they were too conservative, but because they lost sight of the ideals of conservatism. The larger question at stake here is whether they’ll rediscover those values or fall further and further behind.

The incoming Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) failed her first test of leadership as Steny Hoyer beat Jack Murtha for the Majority Leader position in the new Democratic House. Pelosi had been strongly backing Murtha over the past few weeks, despite his ethical problems relating to the Abscam investigation in the 1980s and his history of earmarks.

Hoyer defeated Murtha by a vote of 149 to 86 — a rather astounding margin when Pelosi had been so strongly pulling for him.

Pelosi’s support of Murtha never made sense to me, unless it was due to their doctrinaire dislike of the war in Iraq. Murtha was never a strong candidate. His ethical issues were a ticking time bomb, and his style of management would not make him an appealing member of the Democratic leadership. There had to be some kind of quid pro quo involved somewhere. What it may have been is now probably an academic question.

Pelosi’s strong-arm tactics in pushing Murtha signal that despite all the rhetoric of unity coming from the Democratic camp, the divisions are already starting to show. The fact that Pelosi tried to use committee assignments to force Charlie Rangel into the Murtha camp do not bode well for Speaker Pelosi’s future relations with the Democratic majority. If this is going to be her governing style, the split between Pelosi’s liberals and the Blue Dog conservatives could get bigger and bigger over time.

The Democrats are caught in the same Catch-22 they’ve been caught in for years. They got to the majority based on winning in conservative districts, but now the liberal base that has the real power in the party is going to want results. One side of the other is going to have to win, and if the Blue Dogs win the liberal left may walk away. If the liberals win, it will help the Republicans in their efforts to regain the majority in 2008. Pelosi can’t push too strongly in either direction without tearing the Democratic caucus apart, which doesn’t help her all that much.

The only thing that seems to unify Democrats is wanting to bug out of Iraq, but with top generals saying that’s a horrendously bad idea, the Democrats are in serious political trouble. If they don’t cut and run, the liberal base will call them traitors. If they do, it will further demonstrate that the Democratic Party is not a party that can be taken seriously on national issues. A defeat in Iraq will be a defeat for the United States. Do the Democrats really want to be the party that pushed for an American defeat as the keystone of their majority agenda?

One thing is for certain, it’s going to be a very interesting two years…

Sen. Trent Lott is the No. 2 man in the new Republican Senate minority, proving that the Republican leadership has failed to learn from their recent loss.

Sen. Lott’s defenses for porkbarrel spending and his ties to the K-Street politics as usual crowd all send the wrong message to the American electorate. The Republican Senate badly needs new leadership, not the sort of smarmy political operative aspects that Sen. Lott has come to represent. This decision sends exactly the wrong message, and if the GOP wants to regain the majority, they cannot do so by embracing those things which led them to lose in the first place.

Joe Lieberman has hinted that a switch to the GOP is not categorically out of the question. Now, in all honesty, I don’t find such a switch to be all that likely. Senator Lieberman may not owe the Democratic Party much, but he’s no Jim Jeffords or Lincoln Chafee — he’s still a committed liberal, and he’s still far to the left of the GOP.

What he is saying is that if the Democrats try to screw him over one more time, he will jump ship, and hand the Senate back to the Republicans. That’s a very good position for him to be in, as it magnifies his power immensely. He can now ensure that the Democrats have no choice but to play nice with him — which is a very nice position for a Senator to be in.

The Democrats tried to throw Lieberman overboard — and now he’s got his hands on the Democratic steering wheel as a result. The Lamont strategy was a deeply dumb one, and now the Democrats are getting exactly what they deserve. As I’m fond of saying, it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people…