Now that Nancy Pelosi is officially Speaker, she faces the tough choice of whom to appoint as Intelligence Committee chair, which the media is already starting to focus on:

Many Democrats are closely watching the decision for signs of two things: how the speaker-in-waiting will chart her party’s course on national security issues and how she will handle her first postelection test in dealing with the often fractious Democratic caucus.

“This is the battle that nobody wanted,” one senior Democratic strategist said. “For Nancy to start off her speakership with a fight is a great shame.”

As I’ve written (here and here), there is no way Pelosi should appoint Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who was removed from the bench by the Senate for bribery and perjury, as the new Intelligence chair. The problem is that she’ll be in trouble with the powerful Congressional Black Caucus if she doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Congressional Quarterly reports that Hastings’ “expertise is otherwise uncontested.” Maybe he does have the relevant substantive knowledge. But, as CQ notes, “Democrats and intelligence professionals” fear that Hastings “would become a lightning rod for the GOP,” stalling “the already slow pace of reforming the spy agencies.” No kidding. Will the Democrats recognize that this issue threatens to become the equivalent of gays in the military? Do they want Hastings to become a symbol of how the new Democratic majority is captive to its liberal base and not serious about national security?