There’s a growing dread among Republicans that if not dealt with swiftly and soundly, the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens could do the same damage to the effort to stop Democrats from gaining total control of Congress that the GOP’s scandals of 2005 and 2006 did to the party’s majority.
And this time around, the fear extends to a presidential candidate already swimming against the tide.
As one well-connected Hill aide said, “This is starting to feel like [Jack] Abramoff all over again, with a little bit of [Mark] Foley thrown in.”
The botched response to the misdeeds of lobbyist Abramoff and former Florida congressman Foley are seen in hindsight as being the one-two punch that knocked out Republican efforts to retain even a slim majority in 2006.
The conservative core in Congress is not eager to see a repeat of those debacles, especially over something connected to the wasteful spending they so disdain.
Even before the charges of hiding favors from an Alaskan oil company were handed down against Stevens on Tuesday, some of the senator’s colleagues were already worried about how the infamous pork peddler was affecting their own re-election bids.
They have reportedly been complaining in private that Stevens, rivaled only by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., for his earmark-heavy raids on the Treasury, was already the main impediment to restoring the party’s credibility on fiscal restraint.
And for Republicans worried about getting through the current election, the timing of Stevens’ takedown could hardly have been worse, coming just as the GOP was scoring points against Democrats for their resistance to domestic energy exploration.
“We were finally on a roll on gas prices, and this just shut it down totally,” one Republican operative said. “It does feel a lot like Foley and Abramoff. Smaller in scale, maybe, but the same kind of thing.”
Strategists still debate just how much the predatory e-mails from Foley to congressional pages hurt Republicans in 2006. But when the story broke in September of that year, it certainly added to the story line of the Republicans having become corrupted by too many years in power.
And when House leaders were found to have overlooked signs of Foley’s sexual proclivities, many said they were writing the epitaph for their majority.
But that failure was only the final example of an attitude of protecting an increasingly meaningless majority at all costs. Republican donors and volunteers were already tuning out after discovering via Abramoff that the majority they had helped build was greedily accepting kickbacks and plush junkets.
If the reward of being on top is being humiliated by the corruption of House members like Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham, minority status starts looking pretty good.
Stevens has already been taken out of his leadership slots, but Republicans have mostly remained mum on their colleague’s troubles. There are some, though, ready to start counterprogramming the Democrats on the Stevens scandal.
Their argument is that they can begin denouncing the practice of pork-barrel spending and doing favors for home-state lobbyists, but stop short of expressing an opinion on Stevens’ indictment.
“Guilty or innocent, he wouldn’t be where he is now if he had priorities other than building bridges to nowhere,” said a Republican message guru, who warned that if the scandal follows Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, over to the House, Republicans will need to start building a fire wall now.
Also at issue is how the most famous member of the anti-earmark faction in the Senate Republican Caucus, John McCain, reacts to Stevens.
Will McCain, already famous for taking on members of his own party, see an opportunity in Stevens’ impending fall to preach against the evils of pork, or will the newly stalwart Republican McCain hold his tongue on his colleague’s plight?
It would seem to be a chance for McCain to please conservatives in his own party who have long detested Stevens’ ways and means and to re-establish his maverick credentials. Plus, McCain would surely enjoy it.
