Jane Harman
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Jane Lakes Harman (born June 28 1945), is an incumbent Democrat in the United States House of Representatives, representing the 36th District of California ([map]). She was born in New York City (Queens) and attended east coast institutions of higher learning: Smith College, and the Harvard Law School. Although she graduated from law school, there is no record anywhere in her published biographies that she is admitted to the bar of any state or is legally authorized to practice in any state of the union.
After law school, Harman moved to Washington DC where she became an eager, but inexperienced staffer to a freshman Senator. ("John Tunney's Washington office is in the low-rent district of the Old Senate Office Building in what might be called Freshman Hollow, down at the end of a narrow corridor perpetually cluttered with furniture crowded out of his office, along with an assortment of dirty dishes waiting to be carried back to the cafeteria. There is a sense of eating, conferring, deciding, all at a dead run. Inside, the noise, intensity and clutter increase. The staff (about 30) works in such close-quartered disarray that the place has the atmosphere of a fly-by-night insurance company out to take the money and run. File drawers yawn open. Piles of documents, bills, letters, memos, speeches, books, political posters and general unclassifiable Government Printing Office offal teeter from every flat surface. In four of the offices, there is a sense of people stacked up. ([See http://www.tunney.org/john1971.html]) She was known to be falsely charming and highly partisan. Harman and her colleagues must not have been very capable because Tunney was not reelected to the Senate despite his name recognition, the fame of his father, and the near impossible-to-overcome value of incumbency. He lost to Samuel Hayakawa, a Republican. Results from the 1976 Senate Race: Samuel I Hayakawa (R) - 50.2; John V Tunney (D) ----- 46.9. ([link])
Harman is currently the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Myriad press accounts indicate that the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal), will in fact remove Harman from the senior Democratic position on the House Intelligence Committee in the next Congress. Similarly, press accounts indicate that Jane Harman is fighting back, pressing the issue, and forcing Mrs. Pelosi to publicly turn against her. Mrs. Pelosi has rejected any speculation about any of these matters focusing on the upcoming November elections. Pundits contend that that Mrs. Pelosi would replace Mrs. Harman with the former federal district court judge, the impeached, Alcee Hastings from Florida. ([link][link][link][link][link][link][link][link][link][link])
According to two of her colleagues as reported in www.laweekly.com/news/powerlines/harmans-two-front-war, Mrs. Harman has had major money donors approach Mrs. Pelosi about the need to keep Harman on the House Intelligence Committee as its Ranking Member. According to a commentator, these Members indicated that Mrs. Pelosi was extremely upset by this approach. ([link])
Under normal circumstances, pursuant to the rules of the Democratic Caucus, Mrs. Harman would naturally be rotated off the committee. But, Mrs. Harman has made intelligence her cache and has used her position on Intelligence to raise money for her own campaigns as well as for other Democrats. ([link]) Interestingly, she may be the first Member of this Committee to have politicized her position on the committee to this extent.
Harman is also a member of the Blue Dog Coalition. House watchers know that this is a meaningless membership as the Blue Dogs are unrepresented in the "Pelosi version" of the Democratic Party and the GOP prefers to ignore Democrats whenever possible.
She abdicated her congressional seat, which she held from 1993 to 1999, to run a failed campaign in the Democratic primary for Governor of California in 1998. She lost to the most non-charismatic and uninspirational politician ever seen in American politics--a man whose name describes him--Gray Davis. Davis went on to win the office in the general election, only to be recalled by the voters of California and replaced with The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Having lost, Harman took a part time teaching position at UCLA, where she basically licked her wounds, and then returned to the safe environs of Washington and Congress.
Harman has held a number of Washington DC government positions prior to becoming a Member of Congress. She began her career in Washington by serving as a staffer for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. Senator Tunney was the Chairman of this Subcommittee, and Harman worked for him, basically. She parlayed this Hill staff job into executive branch jobs, serving at the Department of Defense, and then later as the deputy secretary for Cabinet Affairs during the Carter Administration.
Despite Harman having been a Hill staffer herself, at the outset of her career, she is extremely difficult to work for. She has had four staff directors of the Democratic Staff of the House Intelligence Committee in the three and a half years she has been the ranking Democrat. Her first two staff directors had served on the staff for a combined total of approximately 30 years. Harman replaced them with a relatively inexperienced woman who had served briefly as the general counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee under its then Chairman Arlen Specter. This woman resigned her position in less than a year after starting. In addition to the 30 years experience Harman removed from the Committee staff during her time as ranking Democrat, she also suffered other staff turmoil, losing 10 of 11 staffers who had collectively served on the House Intelligence Committee 75 years and replaced them with inexperienced staff who knew little, but how to work the media. This included her hiring of the husband, Jeremy--a political operative, of the CNN Correspondent who broke the NSA "Zero Hour" story, Dana Bash. ([link][link][link][link][link])
Harman is married to Harman International Industries chairman and Harman Kardon co-founder Sidney Harman, has four children, and resides in Venice, California.
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