[insert lame and dated 'Friday' joke here] Anyway, this section will be a lot bigger eventually, but here's part 6, on scandals!
--Scandals: There Could Be a Book on This Section Alone--
For some reason, there are really only two types of personal scandals a politician can have: money and sex. Everything falls into one of the two categories somehow. Even abuse of power pretty much always relates to one of the two, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, whose primary purpose for everything was almost certainly power. Secondary and tertiary, too.
In different eras, different parties have had the lion's share of each: right now, Republicans' scandals usually involve cheap, tawdry sex with prostitutes while wearing diapers (Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana), and Democrats' have something to do with stuffing tens of thousands of dollars of cash in their freezers (former Rep. William Jefferson, also of Louisiana). Note: I am not making up either of these. Really.
Nelson Rockefeller, then the Republican Governor of New York, was in the running for the Republican nomination in 1964 (which at the time several people wanted, though it seems kind of hard to imagine now), until people started making hay of his divorce and remarriage. See, at that point, the Republican Party had a real problem with divorce, and this was especially bad because Rockefeller had had grown children with his old wife, and his new wife had divorced her husband a month before marrying him. Still, though the scandal hurt him, he managed to deal with it, and was doing quite well against Goldwater. Then Mrs. Rockefeller gave birth three days before the California primary, which reminded everyone about her again, and he was sunk. Now, as far as the remarriage goes, it's not really as bad as it sounds: Nelson and Mary, his first wife, had been married in name only for several years, and stayed together for the sake of the children; she had never been fond of the political life in the first place, and when he shifted gears from governing New York to running for President, the strain got to be too much for her, and their relationship, and they sought a divorce.
Margaretta Murphy, known as Happy Murphy, had had a very unhappy marriage with her husband, James Murphy, for a few years; Happy and Nelson became very close, though to my knowledge it is unclear how romantic their attachments became before her divorce. So it's not as if Nelson dumped his old lady for a young chick (Happy was about twenty years his junior, and when he died in his office the only other person there was an aide in her mid-twenties) - the marriages that ended in 1962 and 1963 had long since ceased to deserve the name. Nelson even knew that remarrying would cripple his chances at the nomination, which could easily sink him, and said that he didn't care, that marrying Happy was worth it. Again, I don't know that anyone ever asked him afterwards if marrying Happy was indeed worth not ever being elected President; it seems possible that nobody ever did, since after he failed to gain the nomination he largely faded out of the public eye, though he retained the governorship for just under four terms, and was even Ford's Vice President for a couple of years, at which point the election of 1964 was rather old news, no longer particularly interesting to the people likely to ask those sorts of questions.
The House Ways and Means Committee is one of the most powerful and envied in the House, having a large role in doling out money to various districts; seats there are not obtained or relinquished easily. Getting there at all is hard, and getting to be chairman is even harder. Thus, any member, especially the chairman, should be careful in his behavior so as not to be removed from the committee. This, apparently, was beyond Wilbur Mills (D-AR), who served as chairman for eighteen years, his tenure ended by a scandal with a stripper. Mills was driving at night in DC with his lights off, which is stupid enough by itself that he should have lost the chairmanship then, and was stopped by the police. He was drunk, and his companion, one Fanne Foxe (her stage name), jumped into the Tidal Basin, apparently feeling that the water on a late October night was better than the cops. Amazingly, he was reelected in 1974, almost certainly helped greatly by the Watergate scandal (and by not having an outraged wife; it seems Mills never married). Having dodged a bullet, Mills did the sensible thing and appeared with Foxe's husband on the stage where she danced, later holding a press conference from her dressing room. Shockingly, his constituents did not approve of this behavior, and shortly after he resigned the chairmanship, retiring from the House in 1976.
This mess actually resulted in a Supreme Court case, Powell v. McCormack — but I'm getting ahead of myself here. In 1944, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was elected to the House from New York's 22nd, as the first African-American Congressman from New York ever, and the first from any Northern state apart from Illinois. At this point the civil rights struggle in party positions was in deep flux, and Powell even endorsed Eisenhower in 1956 because he felt Democrats weren't doing enough in that regard (given the behavior of Democrats in the South, both on their own and in their influence on the national party and its platform, I can't say that I blame him); however, Powell still chose to run as a Democrat, as did half of New York's 45 representatives. Over the next twenty years, he did a lot for civil rights, fighting the "whites only" restaurants in the Capitol and the racist segregationists in Congress; unfortunately, Powell also got very comfortable, spending a good deal of money unwisely, some of which didn't actually belong to him, and he took many trips to Bimini (an island in the Bahamas — no doubt it was of much help to him as he pondered how to go about his business in the House and what his New York constituents wanted).
In 1967, based on the evidence of his corruption, the House Democratic Caucus voted to strip Powell of his chairmanship of the Education and Labor Committee (now Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions), and later the whole House excluded him from its chambers entirely. Powell argued that this amounted to an expulsion, but without the leadership having to get the two-thirds margin for such a measure (the House voted 307 to 116 for his exclusion, which is more than two thirds, but it's quite likely that some of the votes for his exclusion would not have been votes for his expulsion); with Powell's seat vacant, there was a special election for his seat, which he won, and he proceeded to sue the entire House leadership, headed by Joe McCormack. In June 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, but he still lost his seniority, and his ethics problems didn't go away; one year later, Powell lost the Democratic primary for the 18th district (New York's district lines having been redrawn at least twice since he was first elected) to Chuck Rangel, who is still serving, and moved to Bimini permanently after he couldn't get on the ballot as an independent.
Amusingly, Rangel is now having his own monetary ethics issues; unfortunately, since the Ethics Committee is always split evenly between both parties regardless of the chamber's proportions, it almost always deadlocks, with a majority needed to do anything, and thus is ineffective. Adam Clayton Powell IV ran against Rangel in the 2010 primary, along with several other people, but Rangel managed to win 55% of the vote, and thus retained his very blue seat.