In 1993, Alcee L. Hastings, a civil rights attorney who
served as the first Black federal judge in Florida history
before being impeached and removed from the bench,
became one of the first Black Members of Congress from
Florida since Reconstruction. Hastings went on to serve
14 terms in Congress where he was regarded as an expert
on foreign policy, serving on both the Foreign Affairs and
Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence; he also held
a seat on the powerful Rules Committee. Looking back
at his full career, Hastings explained: “All of those are
extraordinary types of circumstances that would cause lesser
people to buckle. I did not and I have not.”1
Alcee Lamar Hastings was born in Altamonte Springs,
Florida, at the time a small farming community north of
Orlando, on September 5, 1936. Hastings was an only
child. His parents, Julius C. and Mildred L. Hastings, were
domestic workers who found work out of state for better
wages. Hastings, who lived with his maternal grandmother,
graduated from Crooms Academy in Sanford, Florida, in
1953. When Hastings was growing up, central Florida
was thoroughly segregated. As a high school friend, and
later law partner, remembered: “Both of us were bused
in, to Crooms. It was the black school. Totally segregated.
Everything. The whole town.” Hastings attended historically
Black universities for the entirety of his post-secondary
education. In 1958, Hastings earned a bachelor’s degree
in zoology and botany from Fisk University in Nashville,
Tennessee, and later attended Howard University School of
Law in Washington, DC. Hastings left Howard early and
earned a law degree from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical
University in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1964, he was admitted
to the Florida bar, and he practiced as a civil rights and
criminal defense attorney for the next 13 years. Hastings
was married three times and had three children.2
Hastings became a lawyer at the height of the civil
rights movement in Florida. He joined a practice in Fort
Lauderdale and quickly became a prominent attorney and
community leader in efforts to desegregate South Florida.
Hastings and his partner successfully sued a local restaurant
and hotel to end discriminatory practices. Working with
the local NAACP, Hastings sued the Broward County
school district to desegregate. In 1970, Hastings ran a
largely symbolic campaign as the first African-American
candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Florida. As he explained
to a reporter: “I want black children to know that this is
their country and they have a right to run for any office
they choose, even the presidency.” Hastings experienced
violent opposition to his campaign; someone shot at his
house, leaving a bullet embedded in his mailbox next to his
front door. Hastings made several other unsuccessful runs
for office, before being appointed as a circuit court judge
in Broward County, Florida, in 1977. In 1979, President
James Earl “Jimmy” Carter appointed Hastings to a U.S.
District Court seat in Miami, making him the first Black
federal judge in Florida history.3
In 1981, Alcee Hastings’s promising judicial career came
to an abrupt halt. Hastings was indicted by a federal grand
jury for allegedly soliciting bribes in return for lessening
the sentence in a case. A jury acquitted Hastings in 1983,
but a lawyer who claimed he was working in tandem with
the judge was sentenced to three years in prison. Soon after
Hastings’s acquittal, two fellow federal judges, believing
Hastings was guilty and that he had perjured himself, used
a 1980 federal law to file an official complaint against
Hastings. A special committee was formed and led by John
Doar, a former U.S. Attorney famous for his work during
the civil rights movement and with the House Judiciary
Committee during the impeachment investigation of
President Richard M. Nixon. The committee concluded
there was substantial evidence of wrongdoing by Hastings
and forwarded their findings to the Judicial Conference
of the United States. The Judicial Conference, headed
by Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist,
sent the U.S. House of Representatives its conclusion that
Hastings participated in potentially impeachable offenses.4
In the House, Michigan Representative John Conyers
Jr., chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the
Committee on the Judiciary led Hastings’s impeachment
investigation. Conyers, who spent his congressional career as
an outspoken opponent of what he saw as a racist criminal
justice system was initially skeptical of the charges against
Hastings. But he eventually concluded Hastings was guilty.
The House voted 413 to 3 to impeach Hastings on 17
counts. The Senate agreed and voted guilty on 8 of the 17
counts to remove Hastings from office. But, significantly
for Hastings’s future, the Senate did not ban him from
holding other federal offices. Throughout the trial, Hastings
maintained his innocence. Defiant, on the Capitol steps
after the Senate trial, Hastings announced he was going to
run for governor of Florida.5
Hastings ran for Florida secretary of state instead and
finished a distant second. In 1992, he ran for Congress after
court-ordered reapportionment in Florida—in compliance
with the 1982 Voting Rights Amendments—created a
majority-Black district covering large portions of Broward
County including West Palm Beach and western Fort
Lauderdale. In a close race in September 1992, Hastings
placed second in a five-candidate primary behind Florida
state representative Lois Frankel. In the ensuing runoff,
Hastings defeated Frankel with 58 percent of the vote.
The primary victory in the heavily Democratic district
virtually assured Hastings a seat in the U.S. House; in
November, he defeated Ed Fielding, a real estate salesman,
with 58 percent of the vote. Along with newly elected
Representatives Carrie P. Meek and Corrine Brown,
Hastings became one of the first African Americans elected
to the U.S. Congress from Florida since the Reconstruction
era. In his subsequent elections, Hastings never won
by less than 73 percent of the vote and occasionally
ran unopposed.6
When Hastings entered the House in January 1993, he
received assignments to three committees: Foreign Affairs;
Merchant Marine and Fisheries; and Post Office and Civil
Service. He served on Foreign Affairs through the 106th
Congress (1999–2001). When the Republican majority
disbanded both the Merchant Marine and Fisheries and
Post Office and Civil Service Committees in the 104th
Congress (1995–1997), he was reassigned to the Science
Committee, where he served through the 105th Congress
(1997–1999). In 1999, Hastings earned a seat on the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he
eventually served as vice chair of the full committee and two
of its subcommittees. He was a member of the Intelligence
Committee from the beginning of the 106th Congress
(1999–2001) through December 2007, and again in the
111th Congress (2009–2011). Members on the Intelligence
Committee had a term limit; by stepping down before the
end of the 110th Congress (2007–2009), Hastings was able
to return to the committee later and serve another full two-year
term.7
In 2001, Hastings was appointed to the Rules Committee
to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Massachusetts
Representative Joseph Moakley. He would stay on the
committee for the rest of his career. The Congressional
Black Caucus (CBC) was instrumental in winning Hastings
the appointment; he was the first Black lawmaker on the
committee since Alan Wheat retired in 1994. The Rules
Committee has immense power in the House; it sets the
rules for debate and the number of amendments for
every bill that reaches the floor. Hastings appreciated the
opportunities provided on the panel. “People understand
that term ‘power’ . . . rather than working on the fringes of
legislation, I will be responsible for being directly involved.”
Hastings chaired the Rules Committee’s Subcommittee on
Legislative and Budget Process during the 110th, 111th,
116th (2019–2021), and 117th (2021–2023) Congresses.8
In 2007, Hastings was in the running for chair of the
Intelligence Committee after the Democrats regained the
majority in the House. The appointment ultimately went
to Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes. The national press,
and Hastings as well, believed his previous impeachment
prevented the South Florida Representative from becoming
chair. Hastings understood he could not outlive the
impeachment, that despite his successful congressional
career, it was, as he told a reporter, “part of my life. . . .
It will be in my obituary.”9
Hastings gained a reputation for speaking out in defense
of Democratic policies on the Rules Committee. During
debate over a health care bill in 2017, Hastings explained
to a Republican committee member who asked to bring
down the tone of the debate: “I’m not going to bring my
tone down. I’m mad as hell about what you all are doing,
and I don’t have to be nice to nobody when you’re being
nasty to poor people.” Hasting’s willingness to speak his
mind was a viewed as a strength among his supporters.
Theodore E. “Ted” Deutch, a fellow South Florida
Democratic Representative, explained that Hastings was
someone “who can stand up to a bull, who can represent
people whose voices need to be heard, who’s unafraid to
say what needs to be said.”10
Through his work on the Foreign Policy Committee
and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
Hastings became regarded as an expert on American
foreign policy in the House. In 2004, he was elected chair
of the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe’s
(OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly, an organization formed
in the early 1990s to foster better communication between
national parliaments. Then in 2007 he was selected as
chair of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe, better known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission,
which was created by Congress because of the 1975
Helsinki Accords to monitor human and democratic
rights and cooperation among the participants in the
diplomatic agreement.11
One of the primary tasks of the OSCE’s Parliamentary
Assembly was election monitoring to help ensure fair
elections. As head of the OSCE, Hastings led teams to
monitor the elections in, among other countries, Ukraine
and Azerbaijan; in both elections, the OSCE highlighted
evidence of fraud. The expansion and protection of
fair democratic elections, abroad and at home, was one
of Hastings’s primary interests in the House. Hastings
introduced resolutions that successfully passed the House
calling for fair elections in Gabon and Haiti. In 2001,
he won a promise from the chair of the Appropriations
Committee, Florida Republican Charles William “Bill”
Young, to provide federal money for election reforms in
the United States. Hastings initially sponsored a $600
million amendment, but he withdrew it after he reached an
agreement with Young. “It is essential that Congress provide
states and local governments the necessary assistance needed
to improve their antiquated systems,” Hastings said.12
Since his time as a judge, Hastings had an interest in
Haiti and the rights of Haitian immigrants. There was a
large Haitian and Haitian American population in his South
Florida district. In his first term in Congress, Hastings
supported the intervention by the American military after
a coup deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
In 1994, after President William J. Clinton had already
sent troops to Haiti, Hastings helped write a substitute
to a House Joint Resolution that supported the military
intervention but called for the President to present to
Congress a plan for the intervention. The substitute
amendment passed the House. Hastings also introduced
legislation to reform immigration policies to treat political
refugees from Haiti in a similar manner to migrants with
refugee status from other countries. The bill was not
reported out of committee.13
On the Intelligence Committee, Representative Hastings
prodded U.S. security agencies to recruit more widely,
insisting that reforms to the intelligence community
“should include diversity. There should be more women,
more Arab-language speakers, more [foreign-]language
speakers generally, more Asians, more Latinos, more
blacks.” Hastings also lobbied for funding for “centers of
academic excellence,” to recruit and train more women
and racial minorities for intelligence work.14
As part of his foreign policy and intelligence work,
Hastings, who opposed the Iraq War without support from
the United Nations or a postwar plan, remained critical of
the threat to civil liberties he saw in some counter-terrorism
legislation. During debate on a 2012 defense authorization
bill, Hastings criticized the legislation, saying: “In one fell
swoop we have set up a situation where American citizens
could have their Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth
amendment rights violated on mere suspicions. . . . This
legislation goes too far.”15
Allegations of ethical misconduct continued to follow
Hastings throughout his congressional career. In 2010, a
former employee accused Hastings of sexual harassment
which Hasting denied. The House Ethics Committee
found that the accusations did not “rise to level of a
violation of House rules” and the U.S. Congress Office of
Compliance eventually came to a financial settlement with
the complainant. In 2019, the House Ethics Committee
investigated Hastings following allegations that he had an
improper relationship with an aide. The committee dropped
the investigation in 2020.16
In early 2019, Hastings announced that he was diagnosed
with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He was re-elected to the
117th Congress but was too ill to attend his swearing-in
in January 2021. Hastings died on April 6, 2021. At
the time of his death, he was the dean of the Florida
congressional delegation.17
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