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House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shows no sign of resigning over the Mark Foley-House page scandal. But the mere suggestion that he might do so raises an intriguing political and constitutional question: Who would replace him while Congress is in recess? The answer, it appears, is on a piece of paper locked away in the House clerk's office. In a little-noticed action taken nearly four years ago, the House amended its rules dealing with the "continuity of Congress" in emergencies and the succession of speakers. The rule, cited recently in Roll Call, directs the speaker to "deliver to the...

CHICAGO -- President Bush stood shoulder-to-shoulder with embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Thursday, offering a powerful boost in his moment of need and declaring the country "better off" with Hastert in power. "I am proud to be standing with the current speaker of the House who is going to be the future speaker of the House," Bush said as he opened a speech to raise money for two Illinois congressional candidates. The $1.1 million fundraiser provided the first picture of Bush with Hastert since a scandal broke involving a Republican congressman pursuing underage male pages. Although the president has...

  Dog At Large!April 7, 2005 The Devil once made an offer to former Clinton lackey, Sandy Berger.  The Devil visited Berger's office and made him an offer. "I can arrange some things for you,” the devil said. " I’ll get you a top level security clearance; I’ll give you your 15 minutes of pathetic fame; I’ll make you the best liar in the world and I’ll let you get away with being a despicable scumbag. All I require in return is that your wife's soul, your children's souls, their children's souls and your country’s soul rot in hell for eternity." Berger...

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, with his job on the line because of the spiraling Mark Foley cyberspace page sex scandal, was duped Tuesday into letting a stranger into his Plano home -- a serious security breach. Hastert literally let his guard down and allowed in his house a hustling, self-promoting evangelist little known in this country, the Houston-based K.A. Paul, who at 7:30 a.m. arrived at the speaker's home with a camera-wielding associate. How Paul and his aide, Dennis Ryan, got to Hastert's door is a tale of apparent chance. How the publicity-hungry Paul and Ryan walked through it...

The Republican candidate who's trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Tom Allen on Tuesday called for the resignation of GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert over the congressional page sex scandal.Darlene Curley said Hastert has allowed attention to be drawn away from important issues facing Congress through his "failure to investigate the issue properly." The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation and the House ethics committee is investigating any potential violations of standards of conduct following the resignation of Florida Rep. Mark Foley's over his come-ons to male pages. Regardless of the outcome, Hastert should step down anyway, because he has...

Pundits glued to their Potomac seats, applying their usual Beltway explanations for everything that happens in America, would have it that House Speaker Dennis Hastert bollixed up the House page scandal because he is an unredeemed Republican partisan. Or that he doesn't care enough about congressmen hounding boys. Or that his conservatism made him do it.Blind partisanship, moral failings, hypocrisy, gay bashing or any of those other explanations that don't come close to the reality that Hastert was simply doing politics as it is practiced here, in Illinois.Hastert knows no other way, having been bred, born and raised in the...

A former five-term Boston city councilor pleaded not guilty today in Lawrence District Court to charges that he tried to seduce who he thought was a 15-year-old boy with sexually explicit instant Internet messages. David Scondras, 60, is accused of using the name "Topdadd" to send graphic photographs and sexual messages to a man who identified himself as a 15-year-old. Lawrence police arrested Scondras on Monday in the parking lot of a charter school where authorities say he had arranged to meet who he thought was a teenager. communicating with a 20-year-old security guard who alerted an officer after he...

WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Tuesday he'll dismiss anyone on his staff found to have covered up concerns about ex-Rep. Mark Foley's approaches to former pages. Hastert said he huddled with his staff members last week and he believes they acted appropriately in handling information on Foley's conduct. But he also issued them a stern warning: "If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs." The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation and the House ethics committee is investigating any potential violations of standards of conduct. Timeline pushed back Meanwhile, Rep. Jim...

Fox News on Air Story

Per Fox News: After addressing a group in Aurora, IL, Speaker Hastert will answer questions. He is currently speaking to the group, and the question and answer part will start thereafter.

(2006-10-09) — In the wake of the weekend detonation of North Korea’s first atomic bomb, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, called for the resignation of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL. “It’s important that lawmakers keep the main thing the main thing,” said Rep. Pelosi. “We can’t get so distracted by debates about North Korea’s sovereignty that we forget that Dennis Hastert is still on the loose, indirectly endangering America’s children.” The timing of the atomic bomb test raises questions, she said, about when President George Bush first knew of former Rep. Mark Foley’s lurid instant message chats with teenage...

Gary C. Knapp for The New York Times“That is the problem we have in society. Nobody polices anybody. Everybody has a ‘right’ to do whatever.”DAVID THOMAS, Father, Norfolk, Va. VIRGINIA BEACH, Oct. 7 — As word of Representative Mark Foley’s sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried — and Democrats hoped — that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls. But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many...

A poll conducted for Eyewitness News 4 shows that most Americans are calling for Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to resign in the wake of the Mark Foley page scandal. Foley resigned from Congress last week after admitting to sending explicit instant messages to underage pages. SurveyUSA, which serves television stations throughout the country including KOB-TV, asked 1,000 adults whether Hastert should resign as speaker, resign from Congress or stay put. In all, 43 percent say Hastert should resign from Congress, while another 20 percent want him to resign from his leadership position. 27 percent say he should remain...

It is time to take seriously the possibility that the Democrats will assume control of the House of Representatives in the elections next month. The breaking of the Mark Foley scandal on the last day of the congressional session-Who held on to the incriminating instant messages until this strategic delivery date?-put the Republican leadership on the defensive and changed the political landscape. Speaker Dennis Hastert was right just to warn Foley off communicating with former pages when informed in 2005 of the "over friendly" E-mails that the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald independently concluded were so innocuous as to...

In London, sex scandals come along every other week. You name it, British parliamentarians do it: three-in-a-bed, auto-erotic asphyxiation, gay teen flagellation, getting your toes sucked while wearing the soccer kit of Chelsea Football Club. But at least at Westminster, sex scandals require actual sex. That the governing party of the world's only superpower could be felled by one creepy pervert's masturbatory e-mails and IMs is an event historians will marvel at. Granted that the Roman Empire in its death throes got hung up on gay sex, the American hyperpower seems set to be the first to collapse over gay...

<p>The left, in possession of a scandal which they think can drive a wedge between evangelicals and the GOP, is behaving like a shark driven mad by the scent of blood in the water. Certain individuals strike out blindly in a political feeding frenzy. There’s no telling what wounds will be inflicted on whom.</p>

Soon, with hints before the coming Congressional election and mounting gale force in the weeks following after November 7, the real and full story will inevitably surface about former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) and the nature of his relationships with House Pages, former House Pages, the outers and the outed. His resignation and disappearance into the modern confessional of Rehab would lead everyone to assume that this story is all wrapped up with a ribbon, with definitive “timelines” appearing to show, with no shifting of shadow, that the present Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives is, at the...

SNIP In his Oct. 4 op-ed, Joseph A. Califano Jr. bragged of a day "When the House Could Clean Itself" under the Democratic leadership of Speaker Tip O'Neill. The process worked, Mr. Califano claimed. However, the result stank to high heaven, as neither of the two representatives found in 1983 to have had illicit relationships with House pages was summarily expelled. Instead, they were allowed to remain in the House, with censure their only punishment. One of the guilty parties, Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), contemptuously turned his back on Congress when he was censured. Rep. Daniel B. Crane (R-Ill.) was...

DENNIS HASTERT SHOULD RESIGN as speaker of the House of Representatives. Not necessarily because he failed to act quickly when shown evidence suggesting that Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) was abusing his power with teenagers — not all the details are known, though the ones that are don't look good. No, the Illinois Republican should resign because he's an unimaginative politician and an uninspired legislator. Unfortunately, these days that just makes him a typical congressional Republican.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday. The staff member said Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley's behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in...