The caucus is struggling to define the role it will play for the next two years. Its chairman is traditionally chosen by seniority. The next in line, New Jersey Democrat Donald Payne, is a soft-spoken man with a reputation as a compromiser. He can get along with the GOP, but he will never win a sound-bite war. Hastings has the rhetorical chutzpah; friends call him ““the black tornado.’’ (In 1992, when his white primary opponent kept raising his impeachment, he retorted, ““The bitch is a racist.’’) His election would give the GOP an irresistible target. ““The worst thing they could do is have someone tainted by scandal out front competing with Newt,’’ says Carol M. Swain, a professor of public policy at Princeton and the author of a book about black representation.
Hastings is unapologetic about his background. He once said that if he were white, Congress never would have pressed the case against him. A jury acquitted him of soliciting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for giving two convicted Miami mobsters lighter sentences. But after two fellow judges alleged that Hastings had perjured himself to avoid conviction, Congress intervened. Rep. John Conyers, who is black, led the impeachment proceedings. Undaunted, Hastings ran for governor of Florida. Then in 1992, the state created a majority black district under the Voting Rights Act. Hastings’s candidacy got a boost when, just before the runoff, his impeachment was overturned on a technicality.
The prospect of putting Hastings in charge gives some caucus members the same up-yours satisfaction that District of Columbia voters got when they installed Marion Barry as mayor after he served time on a drug charge. The biggest threat to the caucus is that it will be marginalized into irrelevance. The GOP has ruled that 28 congressional caucuses can no longer use tax money for their activities, and the 41-member Black Caucus is finding it harder than ever to organize a united political front. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, the outgoing chair, has reached out to Republicans so much since the election that the GOP approached him about switching parties. Mfume declined, but says he wants to work with the GOP on issues such as cutting the capital-gains tax and ““empowering’’ inner cities.
Some African-American intellectuals wonder whether the Black Caucus is as out of fashion today as affirmative action. ““I don’t see the need for a racially based caucus,’’ says Swain, who is black. ““I wouldn’t want to be supporting a congressional white caucus.’’ Whoever is elected this week to head the group will need more than fiery rhetoric to set it on course.
