Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), the man responsible for the page program in the House, says that
he is responsible for the failure to do anything about sexual predator and ex-Representative Mark Foley (R-FL). A senior GOP leadership aide also says Hastert won't step down as Speaker of the House. In other words, he is taking responsibility and there is no consequence for his failure to oversee the safety of the House pages.
Why am I not surprised? Yesterday
I wrote:
Boehner, by the way, takes the truest of the new Republican lines on this (there was a time when I respected the Republican Party, but the party of Lincoln, Rockefeller, and Goldwater is as dead as the Constitution in the Bush Era). Boehner says that Hastert is responsible but that there should be no consequences for his failure to act properly in the matter. We've been watching that same sort of attitude for at least five years now. We see it every day with Rumsfeld, who is generally acknowledged to have completely fouled up his job as Secretary of Defense with respect to the Iraq fiasco and Afghanistan, but still has the "complete confidence" of the White House. We saw that with Hurricane Katrina, where only the vastness of the public outcry forced Heckuva Job Brownie to resign. Bush tried to brazen that one out, taking the same line of "complete confidence" with Brown at first. In the end, Brown was just a sacrificial lamb for all of the many incompetent and careless people in the administration. We saw it with Abu Ghraib, where low-level personnel were sacrificed but the people who had real responsibility for the outrages there were given a pass. We see Congress doing it again, with an assist from some conscienceless Democrats, passing laws to allow the United States to torture suspects and to bypass the rule of law in trying suspects just so that certain criminal elements in the administration won't have to stand trial for what they have done. We see it in new revelations that Condileeza Rice, while Director of the National Security Agency, was warned in a meeting in the summer of 2001 that an attack on the US by terrorists was coming and did nothing. Her response to these revelations is that she doesn't remember the meeting, but the people who warned her in that meeting told the 9/11 Commission about it during their hearings. Consider that. Rice was told an attack was coming in July of 2001 and in August she read the Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the US" and did nothing...so the President appointed her his Secretary of State. Responsibility? Accountability?
If someone screws up and there are no consequences, there is a high likelihood that he or she will do it again. We have no reason to believe Hastert would do any better if confronted by another, similar problem in the page program if you let him get away with it this time. Hastert shouldn't just step down: he should resign. He allowed teenaged boys for whose safety he is responsible to be preyed upon by a sexual predator, and he did so for the sake of politics. Him saying that he is responsible is just garbage. Let him resign from his seat in the House. If he stays, he proves once and for all that he is utterly shameless.