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Mark Foley and Congressional Oversight

By j7uy5 on October 3, 2006.

The best commentary I've seen so far about predatorgate is in the href="http://www.bangornews.com/news/t/viewpoints.aspx?articleid=141292&zoneid=34">Bangor
Daily News:


Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - Bangor Daily News



As deplorable as former Rep. Mark Foley’s advances at pages
are, if Congress uses the salacious details of this episode to hide its
own sorry oversight record, in this and other recent situations, those
teen pages would be misused again. Nothing hides other faults like
possible sexual impropriety of an elected official.



The FBI is now looking into the alleged actions of Rep. Foley, a
Republican from Florida, including a report that explicit electronic
messages were sent to former pages in 2003 and that he sent milder
versions in 2005, when he was quietly told by leadership to stop it. He
should be thoroughly investigated and charged accordingly, and who
would be surprised by the release of more e-mail messages with the
congressman propositioning more pages?



But the fact that leadership may have known about this behavior and did
little or nothing about it fits a different pattern of abuse. It is the
abuse of congressional oversight, and just as leadership may have
looked the other way in this case, it looked the other way when...



They go on to list several examples of the failure of congressional
oversight.  It's a good point.


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