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Here's an article explaining why. Maybe not as crazy, but just as corrupt.

Wright should quit. (House speaker Jim Wright) (column)
National Review; 6/16/1989; Buckley, William F., Jr.

A PROFESSOR OF American history writes to ask with exasperation "Why doesn't Jim Wright quit? On top of everything else, be's third in line for the Presidency." His failure to step down suggests an insensitivity that Wright-watcbers noticed way before be began to refashion the book business in order to beat the expenditure rules of the House over which he presides.

It was many years ago, early in Reagan's Presidency, and Jim Wright appeared on the Today show. I hadn't ever before seen a picture of him, and as he flashed on the screen with that avuncular smile and whitish hair I thought, truly this man must be in heavy demand every Christmas to play Santa Claus. So Bryant Gumbel asked the question, "Congressman Wright, how do you account for President Reagan's veto of the supplementary appropriations bill yesterday?" I looked up from my exercise bike to get the political reading of Mr. Reagan's motives from the Democratic majority leader. Jim Wright turned and smiled at Gumbel as though to answer a child's question ("Why do hot dogs cost money, Mummy?"). Mr. Wright explained it all, with a benign, fatalistic smile: "Dohne you unnerstan, Brann, President Reagan's declaired wah on students, ole folks, and cripples." I could only think that at least Congressman Wright had given us a satisfactory explanation for the sharp rise in our defense expenditures.

But that was the man who would a few years later be selected to succeed Tip O'Neill (who, at his best, could be just as bad). Granted, there was some relief when Wright was elected majority leader (stepping-stone to the Speakership) since his closest opponent (Wright beat him by only a single vote) was the late Congressman Phillip Burton of California, from whosespeeches one sometimes had difficulty in answering the question whether he was voting the interests of his constituency, or those of Leonid Brezhnev, even as we have the same difficulty today, surveying tbe activity of Congressman Ron Dellums, Burton's neighbor in Berkeley. But any politician who that early in the morning explains to ten million people the veto by the President of an inflationary money bill by announcing that it was merely another skirmish in the war Mr. Reagan had declared against students, old folks, and cripples should have stayed in bed.

But it isn't analytical simplemindedness that finally got Mr. Wright into trouble. And there are those who say tbat one cannot attribute simplemindedness to anyone who could devise such intricate arrangements as Mr. Wright was able to conclude, for instance, with his "publisher." The fact of it is that a committee, deeply inquiring into his affairs, decided unanimously that a formal hearing will be necessary on 69 of his alleged violations of the rules of the House of Representatives.

Now we may be talking about rules that ought never to have been made (is it really in the national interest to limit a congressman's campaign expenditures?). And there is not much there, that the eye can readily spot, that would escort Jim Wright from the Speakership to the local jail. But whatever the legal evolution of the case, we have here, surely, a classical situation that calls for a person holding a particular office to-step down.

It is instructive to compare British and American attitudes on the question of resignation. Here the habit has developed of holding on to a public office until, as with Sewell Avery, president of Montgomery Ward, the FBI comes in and lifts you out of your office while you continue sitting in your chair. A case can be made, as with Richard Nixon, that to pull out too early from the Presidency would be to destabilize the office. But the Speakership is not the Presidency; nor is a Cabinet officer the President, and tbe resignation in recent years of a Cabinet officer to document his disagreement with executive policy is all too rare. Cyrus Vance was a notable exception, resigning as Secretary of State for Jimmy Carter when the Carter Escadrille was dispatched to take over Iran with six helicopters in 1980. If resignations took place more often, it would diminish the presumption that only the guilty resign.

In the case of Mr. Wright it is certainly true that he would be resigning under fire. But the fire aimed at him has in fact mortally wounded him and he cannot be an effective Speaker to the extent that effectiveness is measured by disinterestedness. He will be observed as motivated entirely by his desire to survive. The day will almost surely come for him which came for Mr. Nixon, when three stalwarts from his own party arrived late one afternoon to tell him that his political support had terminally eroded . . . Mr. Wright should save himself that humiliation, and the United States those pains.