CNN is “live” right now — after 10PM in the east — reporting on the Foley scandal. One big headline is that House Speaker Dennis Hastert has requested an investigation into a possible cover-up of the Foley sex scandal.
If the scandal erupting over illicit emails sent by Rep. Mark Foley, R-Florida, to at least one 16 year-old House page has a familiar ring, it may because 23 years ago the House Ethics Committee charged Rep. Dan Crane, R-Illinois, with having inappropriate relationships with an underage female House page:
After his 1982 re-election, Crane was charged with having a sexual relationship in 1980 with an underage female congressional page. Crane plead guilty to the charge and issued profuse, tearful apologies. He was defeated for re-election in 1984.
During the same 1983 investigations, the Ethics Committee charged Rep. Gerry Studds, D-Mass, with having sex with a male page:
During the course of the … investigation, Studds publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, a disclosure that, according to a Washington Post article, “apparently was not news to many of his constituents.” Studds stated in an address to the House, “It is not a simple task for any of us to meet adequately the obligations of either public or private life, let alone both, but these challenges are made substantially more complex when one is, as I am, both an elected public official and gay.”
As the House read their censure of him, Studds turned his back and ignored them. Later, at a press conference with the former page standing beside him, the two stated that what had happened between them was nobody’s business but their own.
Rep. Studds was reelected five times before he retired in the mid-1990s.
On C-SPAN this weekend, I heard a rightwinger bring up the sex scandal connected to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, as if to mitigate somehow the Foley scandal. But in the Frank matter, the congressman was not the one having sex, and no one involved was under 18:
In 1990, the House voted to reprimand Frank when it was revealed that Steve Gobie was running a prostitution business from Frank’s apartment. Frank had dismissed Gobie earlier that year after learning of Gobie’s activities.
The Boston Globe, among others, called on Frank to resign, but he refused. The House Ethics Committee recommended Frank be reprimanded because he “reflected discredit upon the House” by using his congressional office to fix 33 of Gobie’s parking tickets. Attempts to expel or censure Frank failed; instead the House voted 408-18 to reprimand him. This condemnation was not reflected in Frank’s district, where he won re-election in 1990 with 66 percent of the vote, and has won by larger margins ever since.
The Rep. Mark Foley (R-Palm Beach, Florida) sex scandal rocking the GOP leadership in the House right now may provide an assist to the Democrats’s effort to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, if Foley’s Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, can pull out a win in the 16th district, which has elected a Republican to Congress in every cycle since 1980.
Florida law allows the GOP to replace Foley in the election (although Foley’s name will still appear). The likely replacement appears to have some baggage however:
The frontrunner right now to be the GOP’s candidate for the seat of Rep. Mark Foley — who resigned yesterday amid revelations of his sexually-charged emails to House pages — is Florida State Rep. Joe Negron, a 45-year-old lawyer and aggressive fundraiser. Florida GOPers are telling the St. Petersburg Times that Negron is a strong contender, and Negron himself told the paper, “I’m making calls as quickly as I can.”
Who is Negron? Well, here’s one indicator: Negron full-throatedly supported Gov. Jeb Bush’s efforts to intervene and prevent doctors from allowing the death of Terry Schiavo, the Florida brain-dead woman who was allowed to die after a national battle over her fate. Negron’s take on Schiavo? It was wrong, Negron said in June, “for a judge to say you can’t put water on the lips of a citizen of Florida.”
In his run for state attorney general earlier this year, Negron was the only candidate in the field of four to support intervention by the government in the Terri Shiavo matter, according to an Associated Press story from June 23, 2006:
Three of the four candidates for Florida attorney general said Friday the government should not have intervened in the Terri Schiavo case, but one state Rep. Joe Negron said it was right for the state and Congress to try to usurp the courts.
The Democrat in the race is a former Republican, Tim Mahoney:
On Friday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert denied knowing about the inappropriate, probably illegal, emails sent by Rep. Mark Foley to a 16 year-old boy late last summer. Now he’s been forced to ‘fess up and admit he’s known about the emails for months:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday — contradicting the speaker’s assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.
Hastert did not dispute the claims of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and his office confirmed that some of Hastert’s top aides knew last year that Foley had been ordered to cease contact with the boy and to treat all pages respectfully.
Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, became the second senior House Republican to say that Hastert has known of Foley’s contacts for months, prompting Democratic attacks about the GOP leadership’s inaction. Foley abruptly resigned his seat Friday.
House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post on Friday that he had learned in late spring of inappropriate e-mails Foley sent to the page, a boy from Louisiana, and that he promptly told Hastert, who appeared to know already of the concerns. Hours later, Boehner contacted The Post to say he could not be sure he had spoken with Hastert.
Yesterday’s developments revealed a rift at the highest echelons of House Republican ranks a month before the Nov. 7 elections, and they threatened to expand the scandal to a full-blown party dilemma.
Only after Reynolds’s definitive statement did Hastert concede yesterday that he may have been notified of some of the questionable activities of Foley, 52, who had co-chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus.
The GOP leadership appears to be in full meltdown:
Republican insiders said Reynolds spoke out because he was angry that Hastert appeared willing to let him take the blame for the party leadership’s silence.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
