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Thursday, October 5, 2006
The Foley scandal: Where next?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The assertion by former Rep. Mark Foley’s one-time chief of staff that he told top aides to House Speaker Dennis Hastert three years ago that the disgraced former congressman’s relationships with male pages were too familiar, increase the pressure on Hastert to go. Resigning, as the conservative Washington Times has demanded, would be clean — and a clean admission of guilt. Hastert’s chief of staff flatly denies that they were warned by the one-time Foley aide.
While House leaders do need to lay out as quickly as possible details of what they knew and how they handled the information, Hastert’s resignation gets them nothing — and certainly doesn’t change the political situation for Republicans in the midterm election. The damage is done and Hastert’s resignation would simply give Democrats a new target for the final month of campaigning.
As the Foley matter now stands, Democrats are in real danger of overplaying their hand, as they are wont to do. Foley feeds what was once a gay stereotype, that they were potential sexual predators who could not have unsupervised relationships with boys. The Democratic Party really does not want to build a political campaign on the basis that Foley appeared to be too familiar with young male pages — not in an overtly sexual way, according to the early e-mails, but uncomfortably — and that somebody should have intervened to police him. Clearly in retrospect the familiarity was a warning of predatory intent, but I don’t believe that’s always the case.
It seems obvious now, but had I been the senior member of 435 independent contractors, I don’t know that I would have done more than warn Foley that his actions were making young pages uncomfortable and to stop, with some monitoring to see that he had. But editors at The Miami Herald and The St. Petersburg Times apparently had the same e-mails others did last year and thought them not worth pursuing.
Foley’s conduct was reprehensible and at some point the entire world knew that it had crossed a line. When? And what should be the consequences for Hastert and for Congress and for policing the relationship between pages and members of Congress? Those are questions bipartisan congressional investigators should resolve, though it’s unlikely anything but partisanship can come from this scandal until after the winners and losers are declared in November.
