Nancy Pelosi has a real opportunity to shine this week when she picks a new head for the House Intelligence Committee.
Josh Marshall points out that there’s an option besides the current no-win tossup of Hastings v. Harman.
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.
Rush Holt was for years head of Princeton’s big plasma physics lab before, in a real Mr-Smith-Goes-To-Washington moment, deciding to run for US Representative.
Making a name for himself in DC since 1998, he’s made headlines (and this blog) for his work promoting a paper trail from voting machines.
Holt is smart, savvy, hard-working, experienced, and rock-bottom decent. By choosing him to head the Intel committee, Nancy Pelosi would herself look like the foe of corruption and business-as-usual America went to the polls this month to elect.
My fellow bloggers, let’s encourage Pelosi to look beyond the bad choices of Harman and Hastings.
In The Nation, David Corn strongly recommends Holt, saying
“…this would be a chance for Pelosi to send a signal: the Democrats do regard national security seriously and are willing to put aside political concerns to do the right thing. She would be saying, merit matters most when it comes to protecting the United States.”
You can contact Nancy Pelosi via this webpage.