CA-36: Jane Harman Quits; Janice Hahn Hand-Picked Successor?

Just documenting a little bit that flew by too quick with the news of Harman stepping down to pursue a think-tank job. I put the part in the headline about the speculation that Janice Hahn is Jane Harman's preferred candidate, but there are others.

Per CalBuzz:

Janice Hahn – The L.A. City Council member was Harman’s guest at last month’s State of the Union address; the fact that she announced her candidacy and had endorsements lined up about 12 seconds after Harman publicly made it known she was leaving, leads to the surmise that she’s the favorite of the imperious departing incumbent.

- Garry South is working under-the-radar on her campaign as an unpaid advisor. Not exactly someone who inspires confidence in the judgment of anyone who wants advice from him. (Just a taste of why in case you're not familiar).

- Parke Skelton is Debra Bowen strategist.

Also, I think the last part of the post is important about why the unhappiness of Harman's leaving - because of the possibility that she waited until after the election to be able to control who would take over.

A final word: Harman has never been one of our favorite people, not least because of her overbearing air of wealthy entitlement, and we can’t help but suspect her think tank deal has been in the works for some time, given that her predecessor announced he was leaving last May. So we agree with Huffpost blogger Richard Grenell that G.I. Jane ought to pay the cost of the damn special election to succeed her. What better way to spend some of Sidney’s zillions?

Jane Harman's Complicity in Illegal Torture and Warrantless Spying Programs

As it concerns giving Harman a post in the intelligence apparatus, it's very important for everyone to remember how complicit Jane Harman has been in illegal acts by the Bush administration in allowing detainee torture to take place and in trampling on our rights as American citizens.

From Glenn Greenwald's post from July:

In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:

Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

The article noted that other Democratic members who received briefings on the CIA's interrogation program included Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman. While Harman sent a letter to the CIA asking questions about the legality of the program, none ever took any steps to stop or even restrict the interrogation program in any way.

Identically, numerous key Democrats in Congress -- including Rockefeller and Harman -- were told that Bush had ordered the NSA to spy on American without warrants and outside of FISA. None of them did anything to stop it. In fact, while Rockefeller wrote a sad, hostage-like, handwritten letter to Dick Cheney in 2003 (which he sent to nobody else) -- assuring Cheney that he would keep the letter locked away "to ensure that I have a record of this communication" -- Harman was a vocal supporter of the illegal NSA program. Here's what she told Time in January, 2006 in the wake of the NYT article revealing the NSA program:

Some key Democrats even defend it. Says California's Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: "I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities."

Harman then went on Fox News and pronounced that the NSA program was "legal and necessary" and proudly said: "I support the program." Even worse, in February, 2006, Harman went on "Meet the Press" and strongly suggested that the New York Times should be criminally prosecuted for having reported on the illegal program. And indeed, in 2004, Harman demanded that the NYT's Eric Lichtblau not write about the NSA program. As Lichtblau wrote in his recent book about a 2004 conversation with Harman:

"You should not be talking about that here," she scolded me in a whisper. "They don't even know about that," she said, gesturing to her aides, who were now looking on at the conversation with obvious befuddlement. "The Times did the right thing by not publishing that story," she continued. I wanted to understand her position. What intelligence capabilities would be lost by informing the public about something the terrorists already knew -- namely, that the government was listening to them? I asked her. Harman wouldn’t bite. "This is a valuable program, and it would be compromised,' she said. I tried to get into some of the details of the program and get a better understanding of why the administration asserted that it couldn't be operated within the confines of the courts. Harman wouldn't go there either. "This is a valuable program," she repeated.

In light of this sordid history of active complicity, is it really any wonder that these leading Democrats are desperate to quash any investigations or judicial adjudications of Bush administration actions that they knew about and did nothing to stop, in some cases even actively supporting?

While I'd love to have the chance to replace Harman with a progressive Democrat in my solid blue 36th Congressional District here in California, I would gladly keep her as my congressional representative if that kept her from being in any of those positions of power over intelligence matters. I think the most important thing first is to prevent her from getting named as DNI or CIA Director or DHS Chief. That's essential.

CA-36:Cook Partisan Voting Index of D +11

I don't think I ever highlighted this fundamental statistic for CA-36. Perhaps I didn't realize there was such an index at the time of the Winograd challenge to Harman. But it's a very important statistic because it measures how safely Democratic or not a Congressional District is. The D +11 for CA-36 means this district is extremely lopsided Democratic. And here's what it's about:

The Cook Partisan Voting Index is a "measure of how strongly an American congressional district leans toward one political party compared to the nation as a whole", and it's measured as follows:

The index for each congressional district is derived by averaging the presidential election results in that district from the prior two elections, then comparing them to how the nation voted as a whole. The index indicates the more successful political party and how many percentage points higher than the national average for that party.

So, the PVI D +11 for this district (CA-36) shows that the Democratic pres. candidate received an average 11 percentage points more votes than the national average in the last two presidential elections. No doubt about it.

The reason I'd been researching this for CA-36 is that I had just gotten done reading about a great progressive candidate, Mark Pera, who is challenging a Bush Dog Democrat, Dan Lipinski in Illinois. And while I think having Lipinski in there is horrible, I'd prefer him to a Republican.

But a quick check of the PVI for the district,D +11.3, told me all I needed to know -- this district is super-safe Democratic. So I plunked some cash down for him without any qualms. If you want more and better Democrats, I recommend you do too!

By the way, the table from the diary referenced above has the PVI for all Bush Dogs, so this table should be an immediate reference when the issue of "the wisdom" of supporting a primary challenge of Bush Dog.