Implosion in the House

Man, is this story moving quickly. As far as I can tell, the drama started Thursday afternoon with an ABC News story:

A 16-year-old male former congressional page concerned about the appropriateness of an e-mail exchange with a congressman alerted Capitol Hill staffers to the communication.

Congressman Mark Foley's office says the e-mails were entirely appropriate and that their release is part of a smear campaign by his opponent.

We had the automatic irony that Foley chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and was a champion for stronger laws against child porn and child molesters. But we barely had time to ruminate on that before ABC News confronted Foley with more explicit messages and Foley resigned. That gave the Repubs a problem in holding on to Foley's seat (but it's a seat in Florida, so don't count out any pre- or post-election shenanigans), but it didn't necessarily have broader national repercussions.

That is, until the Congressional House leadership couldn't get their stories straight. The page in question was on the staff of Rep. Rodney Alexander, who was aware of the problem a year ago and says he tried to deal with it through proper channels. The fact that nothing happened until ABC News broke the story suggests that those "proper channels" weren't working quite as they should. We've got a lot of "what did so-and-so know and when did he know it" questions floating around. Majority Leader John Boehner told The Washington Post that he'd spoken to Speaker Denny Hastert about the matter and was assured that it was being taken care of. But after Hastert's office claimed that Hastert had never personally been aware of the situation, Boehner called the Post back and said, then again, maybe he hadn't. Unfortunately, Alexander also told Rep. Tom Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. As Josh Marshall points out, the NRCC is the House's political arm and has nothing whatsoever to do with the bureaucracy of the House leadership. Reynolds also says he told Hastert, and all Hastert's office has had to say for the moment is that, although the Speaker doesn't have any memory of that conversation himself, "he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds's recollection that he reported to him on the problem and its resolution."

As I said at the beginning, this story is moving quickly, and more has been coming in as I've been writing this post. About fifteen minutes ago, The New York Times issued a report on Democratic reaction. TPM Cafe has a timeline (though as of this moment it only goes up through yesterday). The New York Times and The Washington Post each have front-page articles. To keep up with developments as they break, check Talking Points Memo (which, if you've been following many of the links, you can tell I'm leaning on very heavily)--you can see new posts on the main page, but you can find posts from Thursday through Saturday here) or AMERICAblog (September posts can be found here, with October posts here).