Foley, Gays and the Religious Right: Is This the Nail in the GOP Coffin?

If there's any question as to why former Rep. Mark Foley was able to continue his harassment of teenage congressional pages, look no further than the spin of Bush spokesman Tony Snow: "Look, I hate to tell you but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill, and there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply, uh, uh, uh, naughty emails."

Those "naughty emails" (and instant messages) included "I would drive a few miles for a hot stud like you," requests for photos, unambiguous advances ("Do I make you a little horny?"), and exchanges like this one (Maf54 is Foley):

Maf54: What ya wearing?

Teen: T-shirt and shorts.

Maf54: Love to slip them off of you.

But the bigger, more institutional question remains: What did the GOP leadership know, and when did they know it? Evidence suggests that Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Jim Boehner both knew that there were issues -- though neither, of course, cops to awareness of anything approaching the text above. In fact, evidence suggests that Foley's behavior was well known in GOP circles for years, with former page Matthew Loraditch telling ABC News that pages were warned to "watch out for Foley" as early as 2001.

After initially stating simply that he knew nothing until it was reported in the press, House Speaker Dennis Hastert eventually owned up to the fact that his office was notified of "over-friendly" communications between Foley and a page many months earlier. His office was also notified that the page's family "wanted the contact to stop."

This was roughly a year ago, in the fall of 2005, yet the speaker did nothing. In fact, though he admits he was personally told about this by Rep. Rodney Alexander, he also claims to not "explicitly recall" the conversation. Alexander is the congressman of the page on the other end of Foley's advances.

According to an AP report, "Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who heads the House Republican election effort, said Saturday he told Hastert months ago about concerns that a fellow Republican lawmaker, Rep. Mark Foley, had sent inappropriate messages to a teenage boy."

Then there's Majority Leader Jim Boehner's conversation with Hastert, during which, Boehner says, Hastert claimed that "we're taking care of it." That was this spring. Since then, Hastert has allowed Foley several months of "over-friendly" "contact" with a teenager. In a CNN interview, conservative Bay Buchanan noted that the earliest emails "had predator stamped all over it." And that: "No one in the country can suggest otherwise."

Hastert has consistently followed the Katrina approach to leadership: ignore the warning signs, keep cronies in power and undercut investigations of wrongdoing. Hastert himself is the beneficiary of cronyism -- he was shepherded into the position of leadership by Tom DeLay after Newt Gingrich's resignation and the resignation of the man who was poised to replace Gingrich. A third-stringer, as it were.

According to the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman, Hastert's office was well known to take a "laissez-faire" approach to ethics issues. Weisman quotes a Republican source, who adds: "They don't respond when things are bending, but they get very excited when they break."

Sure, this could easily describe Hastert's actions with regard to the Foley case. But the story actually appeared earlier this year when Hastert came under fire for his softball treatment of bribery and corruption allegations against Republican Bob Ney. Ney, who's now in prison, was officially subpoenaed for documents in the Abramoff scandal months before being asked "to temporarily relinquish the chairmanship of the House Administration Committee." Still, upon learning of "over-friendly" communications with a teenage boy, Hastert didn't even ask Foley to quit his post as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus.