Republican leaders continued to battle on Tuesday (October 10, 2006) to limit damage from a sex scandal to the party’s chances in Nov. 7 national elections, with the top Republican in the House of Representatives announcing that he would dismiss any staff member found to have covered up information.
Dennis Hastert, who as speaker of the House is its top Republican, said that he would fire any staff member who hid information about Congressman Mark Foley’s sexually charged advances to former pages, teenagers appointed to run errands for lawmakers while Congress is in session.
Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned from Congress on Sept. 29 after the disclosure of his sexually explicit electronic messages to male pages. Foley has denied having any sexual contact with minors.
Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who says he warned the House speaker’s staff three years ago of improper Foley behavior toward pages, is to testify Thursday October 12, 2006 before the House ethics committee.
Fordham will insist that he warned Hastert’s chief of staff about the conduct in 2003 or possibly the previous year, Fordham lawyer Timothy Heaphy said Tuesday.
Hastert said on Tuesday that he met with his staff members last week and he believes they acted appropriately in handling information on Foley’s conduct. But he also issued them a stern warning: “If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Jim Kolbe said Tuesday he passed along a complaint about inappropriate e-mails from Foley to Foley’s office and the clerk of the House but took no further action at the time. A former page sponsored by Kolbe contacted the Arizona Republican’s office in 2000 or 2001, well before House leaders say they first learned of inappropriate messages sent by Foley.
“Some time after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed as a Page contacted my office to say he had received e-mails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable,” Kolbe said in a statement. “I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley’s office and the clerk who supervised the Page program. This was done promptly.”
Asked about Kolbe’s statement, Hastert told reporters in Illinois, the state he represents: “I don’t know anything more about it. If there’s something that was of a nature that should have been reported or brought forward, then he should have done that.”
An overwhelming majority of Americans think House Republican leaders put their own political interests ahead of the safety of congressional pages in their handling of the Mark Foley scandal, according to a New York Times poll. Seventy-nine percent of those polled – including 61 percent of Republicans – say GOP leaders were more concerned with politics than the well-being of the teenage pages. Two-thirds of Americans say GOP leaders did not take the matter seriously enough when they first learned about it.
While 80 percent of Americans think the Foley scandal is a serious matter for the country, it’s not clear how big an impact it will have on next month’s midterm congressional elections.
That poll also finds Americans are more negative than ever before about the state of the Iraq war. Just 31 percent think the war is going well, the lowest number ever in this poll; while two-thirds say the war is going badly, the highest number ever.
Democrats are progressively more optimistic that they will retake the House and possibly even the Senate. Even a prominent Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, seemed pessimistic that his party will keep its hold on the House.