NYT editorial reminder: Every one of House GOP leaders up for re-election

Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda?
Published: October 4, 2006

The more the House Republican leaders try to defend themselves on the Congressional page scandal, the worse it looks. They still do not seem to appreciate how serious this is, especially for a party that poses as the arbiter of morality. And they appear to be trying harder to deflect blame from themselves than to get to the bottom of what actually happened. The F.B.I. has begun investigating, but that will be a prolonged process, and the voters have to render a verdict in five weeks. There is evidence emerging that they should consider.

Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, is responsible for the page program, and for seeing that the recent improprieties are properly investigated. His performance has been disturbing. As late as Monday, he was still minimizing the scandal. He said he understood that the improper contacts between pages and Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned last week, occurred after the pages left the program....First, it’s not at all clear that events transpired after the pages left the program. And, in any case, why is that relevant? Surely preying on ordinary young Americans is just as vile as preying on pages....

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It is disturbingly difficult to straighten out the basics of who said and did what when. John Boehner, the majority leader, was saying late last week that he did not recall informing Mr. Hastert that there was a problem with Mr. Foley. Now he is insisting he did and trying to dump the mess in the speaker’s lap. Thomas Reynolds, the New York Republican who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, insists he told Mr. Hastert this spring of his concerns about Mr. Foley. But Mr. Hastert says he does not recall being told.

There are more unanswered questions. When John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who is chairman of the House Page Board, learned of the Foley problem, he informed the House clerk, but not the Democrat on the committee, or anyone in the Democratic leadership....Mr. Reynolds, who was one of the few members of Congress to know about the Foley problem early on, insists he did all he had to when he “took it to my supervisor,” Mr. Hastert. But Mr. Reynolds is a key member of the House leadership, and his constituents need to know whether he knew enough to have done more than he did. We’d also like to know why, in the months when Mr. Reynolds was one of the few people to know of Mr. Foley’s misconduct, Mr. Foley contributed $100,000 to Mr. Reynolds’s Congressional campaign committee.

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Every one of these political leaders is up for re-election next month....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/opinion/04wed1.html

Loved the swipe at Tony Snow and emphasis on the fact that we can easily remove ALL of these disgusting Republican representatives from office next month.