This sounds like more bad news for House Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Republican party that he seems to be helping drag down in the polls:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.
The staff member said Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley’s behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.The staff member’s account buttresses the position of Foley’s onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham’s own efforts to stop Foley’s behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.
Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described “did not happen.” Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham’s attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client’s cooperation.
“We are not preparing to cooperate. We are affirmatively seeking to,” Heaphy said.
What does this mean for Hastert and this scandal? It probably means the drip-drip-drip of news stories is going to continue for quite awhile. Hastert will remain a figure under intense scrutiny — his every move, decision and past will be put under the microscope. He now has a credibility problem with the national news media.
News reports such as this won’t help the GOP either, although it could be that the damage to the GOP has now hit or is close to hitting rock bottom. That would explain why the White House and GOP party elite have decided to hang tough with Hastert and the amount of talk by GOPers about him possibly resigning is falling by the wayside.
But there is a continued dilemma. White House and party strategists may not want Hastert to get the old-heave-ho because it would give the Democrats a change to say “I told you so” and the media to do a news cycle about why they hadn’t acted sooner. And the scandal might not slice off a lot MORE of the party’s base on Election Day.
But news stories such as this (or if more come out that cast Hastert’s comments and job performance in a bad light) mean it’s harder to regain parts of the base lost — and disgruntled independents will continue to flee the GOP as quickly as a cat sitting on a chair upon which Hastert is about to sit. A reminder again: the GOP did NOT become the majority party and win the past two presidential elections by only getting Republican base votes. It got a good number of independent voters.
Lawrence O’Donnell in the Huffington Post: points to the L.A. Times “outing” a gay Republican and predicts there could be more of the same as this story unfolds…with political repercussions:
It’s no accident that the first call for Hastert’s resignation came from Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich’s former press secretary. Tony knows that the scandal cannot die as long as Hastert and his staff are still in the building.
The Republican base–the Evangelical get-out-the-vote troops–are going to be devastated when they discover how many closeted gay Republicans were involved in policing Mark Foley in the House of Representatives. Republican House members know this. That’s why momentum is building for a very quick House cleaning and a new Speaker by next week.
ALSO READ:Gateway Pundit, Progressive Blog Digest, Americablog, Joshua Marshall, The Heretik
CORRECTION: We’ve written “House Speaker Dennis Hastert” in most posts here but just realized we had “Majority Leader” in some recent ones. We are correcting the dumb error and will correct it on any other past posts we see with it as we find them..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.