As a federal judge, he was impeached and removed from the bench. He was then elected to the House, where he became known as a strong liberal voice.
Representative Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who, despite being impeached and removed from the bench, was elected to Congress, where he championed civil rights and rose to become dean of the Florida delegation, died on Tuesday. He was 84. Lale Morrison, his chief of staff, confirmed the death. He provided no other details. Mr. Hastings, a Democrat, had announced in early 2019 that he had pancreatic cancer. He continued to make public appearances for a time but was unable to travel to Washington in January to take the oath of office. His death reduces his party’s already slim majority in the House of Representatives, which is now 218 to 211, until a special election can be held to fill his seat. His district, which includes Black communities around Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach as well as a huge, less populated area around Lake Okeechobee, is reliably Democratic. A strong liberal voice, Mr. Hastings was a pioneering civil rights lawyer in the 1960s and ’70s in Fort Lauderdale, which at the time was deeply inhospitable to Black people. Throughout his career he crusaded against racial injustice and spoke up for gay people, immigrants, women and the elderly, as well as advocating for better access to health care and higher wages. He was also a champion of Israel. He achieved many firsts. He was Florida’s first Black federal judge and one of three Black Floridians who went to Congress in 1992, the first time Florida had elected African-American candidates to that body since Reconstruction. He served 15 terms in the House, longer than any other current member, making him dean of the delegation. He had earlier in his career been the first Black candidate to run for the Senate from Florida. In 1979, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In 1981, he became the first sitting federal judge to be tried on criminal charges, stemming from the alleged solicitation of a bribe. The case ended up before the House, which impeached him in 1988. The Senate convicted him in 1989 and removed him from the bench. But it did not bar him from seeking public office again, and he went on to win his seat in Congress three years later. He took the oath of office before the same body that had impeached him. If his wings were clipped in Washington, Mr. Hastings was adored at home, where his early fights for civil rights and his outspokenness helped him easily win re-election for nearly three decades. In a 2019 review of his career, The Palm Beach Post described him as “a man with immense gifts — boldness, intellect, wit — who repeatedly and brazenly strides close to the cliff’s edge of ethics, unconcerned that scandal could shake his hold on a congressional district tailor-made for him.
