Another Sexually Charged House Page Scandal
WashingtonPostBlog | By Mary Ann Akers | December 6, 2007; 6:20 PM ET
So much for reform of the House page program in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal. House teenage pages are so wild and unsupervised that two GOP members of Congress have resigned from the House Page Board, protesting that they were not informed of two pages caught shoplifting and two others busted for engaging in public oral sex.
One of the members who resigned, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida, tells the Sleuth that she felt "very, very uncomfortable" both as a mother and a grandmother continuing to serve on a board she feels is inadequately supervised.
"I thought the Mark Foley incident was a wake-up call," Brown-Waite said, referring to the disgraced former GOP congressman from Florida who was caught sending sexually tawdry instant messages to male House pages. "Apparently it wasn't." The congresswoman added, "If I had a 16-year-old granddaughter, I wouldn't let her come up here. I would not let my 16-year-old grandson come up here." (The congresswoman does have a 16-year-old grandson.)
One of the incidents that bothered Brown-Waite involved what she called "inappropriate sexual indiscretions" between two teenaged pages. She would not elaborate, though she said other pages served as "enablers." A source familiar with the incident - which resulted in the expulsions of two pages - said one female page performed oral sex on a male page in the page dorm room as the other teenagers watched. "The enablers provided cover for them, the other pages were watching," the source said.
According to Brown-Waite, the alleged public sexual indiscretions were "not an isolated incident."
Two other pages were expelled for shoplifting. Brown-Waite and another source said one of the shoplifters was charged with a felony.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) , Brown-Waite suggested that the Clerk of the House, whose job it is to oversee the House page program, should no longer be in charge of the teenagers. "Page supervision, other than on the floor of the House, is found to be sorely lacking, and the clerk has been slow to share information with members of the board," Brown-Waite wrote. "In at least one vitally important incident, we were intentionally kept in the dark about dismissals for more than a week, and were only given the details after personally confronting the clerk with rumors we had heard."
Both Brown-Waite and Rep. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who also resigned from the page board in protest, said they blamed Pelosi for not reforming the program as promised. Capito said the "problems with communication between board members that plagued the program in the past have only continued under new House leadership." Capito plans to officially tender her resignation on Friday.
The congresswoman was referring to the political dustup during the Foley scandal when then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was accused of a cover-up. His staff was reprimanded later by a review panel for failing to communicate information to Democrats on the board about Foley's sexually explicit electronic messages with pages. The Foley scandal was the last straw in a string of scandals that cost Republicans the majority in 2006.
Funny—the Dems were really concerned about the pages’ welfare last year. I thought they cleaned things up? /s