Tornado Alley (PROG)

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arizona1, What the Jim Jordan scandal tells us about GOP morality

By Paul Waldman
Opinion writer
July 11

this one goes to your concerns

[...]

Contrast that to what happened when Al Franken D-Minn.), a respected senator many liberals hoped would run for president, faced allegations of inappropriate conduct. It look just a few days before many of his own colleagues in the Senate demanded his resignation, and he complied.

You might argue that was just crass politics, since the Democrats believed their base wouldn’t stand for them tolerating any sexual misbehavior among their own, and therefore it was less a sincere moral stance than a political calculation. But even if that’s true, it shows that one party — both its representatives and its voters — thinks any degree of sexual abuse is intolerable and is willing to act on that belief, while the other party doesn’t and isn’t.

You can point to cases where at least some Republicans tried to get rid of a member of their party facing allegations of misconduct, such as Roy Moore and Larry Craig (of the famous “wide stance“). But in every case it was only when it became too much of an embarrassment to sustain. And let’s not forget that the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in history, Dennis Hastert, was an admitted child molester who was defended by many Republicans even after his crimes became known. And in a parallel to the Jordan scandal, in 2006 Hastert had been criticized for knowing about Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) inappropriate conduct with teenage congressional pages but doing nothing about it. Then as now, Republicans defended Hastert and resisted calls for him to step down.

Today, when allegations of this sort surface against a Democrat, the first impulse of those in the Democratic Party is to assume that the victims are probably telling the truth and ask whether the member should resign. That wasn’t always their response in the past, but now it is. The first impulse of Republicans when such a scandal touches their own, on the other hand, is to defend the member no matter what the facts suggest and charge that it’s a liberal conspiracy.

That may be partly because they all pledged their loyalty to a president who is on tape bragging about his ability to commit sexual assault with impunity (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”), and who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct by a dozen women. Whatever the reasons, they haven’t caught up to the morality of the 21st century.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/07/11/what-the-jim-jordan-scandal-tells-us-about-gop-morality/?utm_term=.ad457713f6bf