This is not a good climate for defending Denny Hastert. And what I’m about to do isn’t defending Hastert. But I am struck by how rapidly and totally he is being abandoned or written out of the history of various institutions on the basis of what are still only accusations.
To anticipate any misunderstandings, federal prosecutors wrote their indictment with carefully chosen language meant to signify not only that the former Speaker had been accused of “misconduct” (which we now seem to know was some kind of sexual abuse) but that he was in fact guilty of it. Not guilty in a judicial sense but guilty in the sense of these aren’t accusations; it happened. Hastert would seem to have signaled some level of guilt by agreeing to pay out such a staggering sum to keep it quiet. He also quickly resigned from most or all of the professional positions of trust he held. And on top of all this, if Hastert had anything good or exculpatory to say it’s quite reasonable to think he would have said something publicly. And yet he hasn’t.
Yet we still know very little about what happened. And in a judicial sense, he’s only just been accused.
And yet his alma mater, Wheaton College has already announced that it was renaming the public policy center named in his honor yesterday.
On the Capitol Hill today, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had to gently push back against suggestions that Hastert’s image be removed now from the Capitol Hill complex. (Hastert is the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in US history.)
The honor of having a building named after you is different from having your picture appear in the Capitol. In the latter case, he’s not there because he’s awesome. He’s there because he is part of our history. For better or worse. Sufficiently great disgrace might be enough to override that. But I think McCarthy is certainly right to wait until we know more about what happened before taking that step.
Needless to say, I’m not trying to portray Hastert as a victim here. It seems very likely that he’s guilty of some very dark crimes. Really it has less to do with him than about the motions we go through to honor the principle of innocence until proven guilt. I thought this a bit when I saw the Wheaton College news. But it really became clear to me when I saw that people were already calling for his ceremonial portraits to be removed from the Capitol.
We routinely take the ‘alleged’ in front of murder charges which are almost certainly accurate in a factual sense. In this case, it seems clear that the statutes of limitations on any of Hastert’s crimes have long since lapsed. So we won’t get a judicial judgment on the matter. And we don’t need to wait in the case of what are really just honors of various sorts. But it’s still worth observing for the record.
