Gingrich/Hastert Era Needs to Come to a Close
Ever since the Gingrich revolution of 1994, too many Republican in Congress have been amassing power for themselves while rearranging the rules for their own benefit. Steve Soto of The Left Coaster nails it when he writes:
The more you read about Foleygate, the more obvious it becomes that these guys put the party above the law and the good of the nation. Neither Republicans or Democrats can afford to do that for long.
My wife worked for seven years at a school for troubled adolescents and most were between the age of 14 and 18; the age of the Congressional pages involved were usually about 16. If even a lowly staffer at my wife's school had passed on concerns to a senior staff member that some of the boys felt a staff member, male or female, had been "overly friendly," the entire senior staff would have been all over the issue in minutes. If they learned that "overly friendly" involved any sexually inappropriate behavior, physical or otherwise, the staff member would have been fired; if the staff member were possibly innocent, he or she might still be put on administrative leave until the issue was resolved. The senior staff was also required to contact authorities within 24 hours. The reality is that any problems were never allowed to get far and were dealt with quickly. The school has been a successful program for over twenty years. Hastert was a teacher for 16 years; he's supposed to know better.
Things were not good under Gingrich; already, during his time, the rules were being bent. But things in Congress only got worse under Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay. House Speaker Hastert specializes in looking the other way (read: specializes in cover-ups) when curious items sponsored by his fellow Republicans keep showing up in legislation or the Bush Administration allows record corruption in Iraq and Katrina or peddles bogus intelligence information; of course, Hastert has also made himself famous by rubber stamping whatever Bush wants.
Congress is supposed to be the body of the people but it has become the body for those with the most money. It's time for Hastert to go. And it's time for fresh faces and some reasonable acountabililty.
So Denny Hastert tries to take responsibility by saying more rules are needed for him to ignore. Hastert’s remedy is also to name Louis Freeh to investigate zippers other than Clinton’s. Nancy Pelosi rightly shoots that out of a cannon, saying that an investigation is needed, and not another zipper hunt by Freeh, who couldn’t be bothered to focus on Al Qaeda in the 1990’s. And then to cap off the failed strategy for the GOP, three more pages come forward to ABC News and accuse Mark Foley of making online sexual advances to them.
If Hastert and the White House thought they could contain this through a false acceptance of responsibility for ignoring the rules already in place, and then call for even more rules for Republicans to ignore, they were wrong. It may already be too late. An internal GOP poll and analysis by a Republican strategist this afternoon concludes that if Hastert stays as Speaker, the GOP will suffer cataclysmic losses next month, and yet it appears that both Cheney and Bush are insisting that Hastert stays....
The more you read about Foleygate, the more obvious it becomes that these guys put the party above the law and the good of the nation. Neither Republicans or Democrats can afford to do that for long.
My wife worked for seven years at a school for troubled adolescents and most were between the age of 14 and 18; the age of the Congressional pages involved were usually about 16. If even a lowly staffer at my wife's school had passed on concerns to a senior staff member that some of the boys felt a staff member, male or female, had been "overly friendly," the entire senior staff would have been all over the issue in minutes. If they learned that "overly friendly" involved any sexually inappropriate behavior, physical or otherwise, the staff member would have been fired; if the staff member were possibly innocent, he or she might still be put on administrative leave until the issue was resolved. The senior staff was also required to contact authorities within 24 hours. The reality is that any problems were never allowed to get far and were dealt with quickly. The school has been a successful program for over twenty years. Hastert was a teacher for 16 years; he's supposed to know better.
Things were not good under Gingrich; already, during his time, the rules were being bent. But things in Congress only got worse under Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay. House Speaker Hastert specializes in looking the other way (read: specializes in cover-ups) when curious items sponsored by his fellow Republicans keep showing up in legislation or the Bush Administration allows record corruption in Iraq and Katrina or peddles bogus intelligence information; of course, Hastert has also made himself famous by rubber stamping whatever Bush wants.
Congress is supposed to be the body of the people but it has become the body for those with the most money. It's time for Hastert to go. And it's time for fresh faces and some reasonable acountabililty.
posted by Craig at 3:48 PM
1 Comments:
Hastert, like DeLay, epitomizes House Republicans. For some time now, I've afforded House Republicans the distinction of being the lowest form of legislative life in the nation.
Coast to coast, border to border, in state legislatures and small-town councils, it doesn't get any worse than the U.S. House of Representatives of the past dozen years.
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