Word: pages
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...Hastert's announcement of the investigation comes three days after Representative Ray LaHood, a fellow Illinois Republican and friend of Hastert, called for the page program to be temporarily suspendend. "This is a flawed program," LaHood told TIME. "The fact that a member of Congress is sending e-mails to a page and that he can get away with it [shows that] obviously there are problems." Two more Republican representatives, Jon Porter of Nevada and Kay Granger of Texas, also supported LaHood's reccommendation to suspend the page program until an outside team could evaluate its security protocol...
...Meanwhile the Office of the Clerk, which runs the House page program, has established a toll-free hotline for current or former pages - and their parents - to report any tips related to Mark Foley or to the page program. The hotline is Hastert's own doing. "As the Speaker, I take responsibility for everything in the building," he said in a statement Thursday morning. "The buck stops here. The safety and security of the students in the page program is imperative...
...House page program is separate from the Senate's program. Approximately 30 pages are a part of that program, which is run by the Sergeant of Arms Office in the Senate. Calls inquiring possible changes to the Senate page program were not returned...
...Both page programs trace their roots to 1829, when Senator Daniel Webster appointed a 9-year-old boy to be his personal gopher. Since then thousands of young men - and eventually young women - have come to Washington to run errands for the members of Congress. Like many jobs in Washington, getting hired as a page often means having the right political connections. The work is also grueling, especially during the school year, when pages start class at 6:45 a.m. and can stay on the House or Senate floor late into the night...
...Many pages have only fond memories of their experiences on Capitol Hill. Megan Smith recalls how much closer she got to representatives as a House page than later as a legislative aide. "The experience was much different as a page - we were sitting on the House floor for six or seven hours a day," says Smith, 23, who was a page from...