Is it over for Denny Hastert?
I’ve thought since late Friday night that Hastert and probably other members of the House leadership were finished. And you’ve likely seen now that the Washington Times has called for Hastert’s resignation.
My take is that Hastert cooked his own goose in the first half dozen or so hours of this scandal. At one level, he’s Speaker. So by definition, anything that went wrong in the House is his responsibility. And with the amount of voltage coursing through this story, he was always going to be in a very tight spot.
But when this thing broke, most of the key House leaders were in some sense or another saying, ‘Yeah, I heard about it. I did X. Clearly that wasn’t enough.’ Denny Hastert was the only guy, as this thing exploded Friday night, who was obviously lying.
Pretty much everybody in the leadership knew something about it. And most of them remembered telling Hastert. But he’d never heard about it. He was out of the loop. John Boehner just made up remembering telling him. Rodney Alexander contacting Hastert’s office. He never heard. Tom Reynolds was lying too, until it was clear Reynolds wouldn’t eat his words like Boehner.
The scandal — to the extent we are talking not about Foley as an individual but the leadership’s role in enabling him — is about accountability. And at the gut check moment, Hastert lied to duck responsibility.
Everyone could see it. And from that moment on he couldn’t, and I suspect he can’t, shake that defining impression.
On Friday night Hastert could have said, ‘I heard about this. I thought we’d taken care of it. Clearly there was much more there than we realized. Now we’re going to get to the bottom of it.’ If he had, I don’t think we’d be hearing those calls for resignation, at least not yet.
Yet all of us can only be who we are. He could have said that. But he didn’t. I suspect because he’s the same guy who let Foley run unchecked for years, presided over a regime that enabled him, like so much else. It was in character.
