Hastert Says He's Staying
He says he is staying:
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said today that he would not step down, even as questions intensified about why Republican leaders in the House did not act more aggressively when they learned months ago that Representative Mark Foley was sending e-mails to a teenage page that disturbed the youth and his parents.
But it seems others want him to go:
“I believe I talked to the speaker and he told me it had been taken care of,” Mr. Boehner told a Cincinnati radio station. “My position is it’s in his corner, it’s his responsibility. The clerk of the House who runs the page program, the Page Board — all report to the speaker. And I believe it had been dealt with.”
“I did what most of us would have done in the workplace,” Mr. Reynolds told reporters in Amherst, N.Y., on Monday night. “I heard something, I took it to my supervisor.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away.
David Bossie, who runs a group called Citizens United, called yesterday for Hastert's resignation and said other conservative leaders are likely to follow suit. Bossie said the initial e-mails alone, which included Foley's request of a minor's picture, should have prompted an immediate inquiry. "That was a cry for an investigation," Bossie said. "Why couldn't the speaker of the House muster the will to stop this?"Leaders from about six dozen socially conservative groups held a conference call late yesterday afternoon, and participants were described as livid with House GOP leaders.
"They are outraged by how Hastert handled this," said Paul M. Weyrich, a conservative activist who participated in the call. "They feel let down, left aside. How can they allow a guy like [Foley] to remain chairman of the committee on missing and exploited children when there is any question about e-mails?"
Republicans are trying distance themselves as fast as possible from the questions they are facing regarding Mr. Foley. Yet, it is clear that the leaders of both the GOP House re-election committee and the Speaker of the House knew that Foley had engaged in behavior that was, at best, highly questionable.
According to ABC News, a Republican staffer warned pages about Foley five years ago. Statements from House Republican leaders indicate that they knew of Foley’s behavior but did not act to stop Congressman Foley at the time that they first learned about the inappropriate emails.
They were all culpable:
Since 1995, when Foley arrived in Washington and his party took power, Republicans have turned the House into an institution that serves its members and its patrons, not the public. Bad as those earlier cases involving money and election laws were, the deplorable revelations about Foley have House leaders scrambling as never before to contain damage and avoid blame. Rep. Reynolds faces a tough reelection campaign, and a House staffer told The Washington Post that Rep. Reynolds took on the speaker because "this is what happens when one member tries to throw another member under a bus."In that spirit, Republicans competed with each other to demand criminal investigations of Foley. To investigate themselves, however, House Republicans prefer the Ethics Committee, which gave Tom DeLay pass after pass before public pressure finally forced the committee to strip Mr. DeLay of his majority leader post. Remembering that, it's no surprise that the House Republican leadership can't issue a good explanation for why it worked in secret to protect Mark Foley. The only plausible explanation is that political values mattered more than American values.
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