Word: speaker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...House Speaker Dennis Hastert twisted briskly in the hurricane-force winds of the Foley scandal last week, my thoughts turned to Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, the former leader of Senate Republicans. Lott, you may recall, found himself in a similar fix in December 2002, after he offered a rather too enthusiastic toast at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, in which he suggested that if Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign had succeeded in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years." Lott was jettisoned posthaste, with an ample assist from President George W. Bush...
...contrast, the President went all cuddly in his defense of Hastert, calling the ursine Speaker "a father, teacher, coach who cares about the children of this country." This, despite the fact that Hastert's inability to control the Foley fiasco -both before the Florida Congressman was outed as an antic pursuer of adolescent House pages and after the scandal broke -could well cost the Republicans control of the Congress. Why was the President so eager to dump Lott and protect Hastert? Because George W. Bush prizes loyalty over competence or accountability...
...friendly news contact who was always good for a laugh. He once gave me a story-making quote for a scoop in Legal Times about another scandal. It was an account of another G.O.P. congressman saying, at a closed-door January 1997 Republican Conference meeting, that then-Speaker Newt Gingrich's own attorney had charged that Gingrich had "lied to him and had deceived the [ethics] committee...
...hard to believe any of that matters. If it did, why has it been more than 20 years since there was any real discussion in Congress about ending the page program? The answer, of course, is that this century-old institution has now embarrassed the G.O.P. and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Allegations that Rep. Mark Foley had inappropriate contact with male pages, and that Republicans in power may have known about the allegations long before any action was taken, suggest that someone in the leadership slipped up - and many believe the quickest fix is to get rid of pages altogether...
...margin may be fueled by the rolling scandal over sexually explicit e-mails sent to teenage pages by Republican Representative Mark Foley. Almost 80% of respondents were aware of the scandal, and only 16% approve of the Republicans' handling of it. Those polled were divided, however, on whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign over his handling of the Foley affair, with 39% saying he should resign and 38% saying he should...