Finding a scapegoat

Thursday, Oct. 12, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.

As reports surfaced this week that at least one Republican House member knew of former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges with teenage congressional pages as far back as 2000, House Speaker Dennis Hastert called for the firing of any staff member who failed to notify him about the allegations.

Investigations are under way to determine who knew about Foley's often sexually explicit communications with male congressional pages and when. Hastert has said he and two other House Republicans only learned of some of the e-mails last fall. Hastert said his staff members described them as "overly friendly," so he required no further action.

Foley resigned two weeks ago after news reports that some of his communications with former pages - who were 16 or 17 at the time - were sexually suggestive. In the wake of Foley's resignation, Kirk Fordham, a former Foley aide, says that he alerted Hastert's staffers to the inappropriate behavior as far back as 2004. And earlier this week, Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., said that a male former page had shown him inappropriate messages that he had received from Foley in 2000.

Each revelation that someone else in Congress may have known about Foley's electronic communications sends Republicans scrambling for cover as the November elections approach. Some have accused Democrats of leaking the communications to the news media as a political tactic, when, in reality, it was the pages themselves who stepped forward.

Hastert has rejected calls for his resignation and instead chooses to focus on the supposed missteps of staff members - who, in his estimation, should lose their jobs because they didn't do enough to let him know that Foley's behavior was inappropriate.

It is arrogant and pathetic that congressional leaders, who dropped the ball when Foley's acts were first reported to them, are now trolling about their staffs for scapegoats. Members of Congress shouldn't need staff members to tell them right from wrong.