A sordid tale of two senators

Larry Craig is fighting for his political life, while David Vitter gets slapped on the back. Conclusion: Republicans think that sleeping with prostitutes is OK.

30 Sep 2007 // It was a big couple of days last week for Idaho's Republican senator Larry Craig. Still cast in the long shadow of a sex solicitation scandal, he nonetheless chugs along being Totally Not Gay, and proving it so by voting against invoking cloture on hate crimes legislation in the Senate. He hates Teh Gays - how could he be one?

To that end, the senator has withdrawn the guilty plea he entered after being nabbed playing footsie in an airport bathroom, and has also overruled his own previous decision to resign from the Senate, vowing instead to "continue my work in the United States Senate for Idaho" while his attempts to clear his name make their way through the courts. A (naturally anonymous) source has reported that Craig is telling close associates he will stay in the Senate through the trial, if the presiding judge allows his case to be reopened - a prospect that doesn't sit well with some influential members of the GOP establishment in DC, who continue to pressure Craig to resign by the end of September, as he originally said he would. The Senate ethics committee has also indicated it will investigate his conduct if he stays.

This is not exactly the same treatment, however, with which Craig's colleague, senator David Vitter of Louisiana was met when he quietly returned to Capitol Hill in July, after it was revealed that he's evidently spent the last few years proving his very manly heterosexuality by frequenting the services of the D.C. Madam. No, Senator Vitter received a round of applause at a GOP Senate luncheon. And then he quietly went about his business, denying he'd had sex with any local Louisiana ladies, until Hustler magnate Larry Flynt showed up with a hooker in tow, with whom Vitter had indeed done the deed (many, many times) - and not just any hooker, but one who looks like Vitter's wife (and has the same first name). Eugh.

Still, there has been no move by the Senate ethics committee to investigate Vitter. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a non-profit legal watchdog group which filed ethics complaints against both Vitter and Craig, noted in August: "The GOP leadership in the Senate joined our call for an ethics investigation of Craig, yet have been silent on Vitter."

In fact, the GOP is instead making moves trying to protect their members from external ethics complaints. TPM's Paul Kiel reported on the GOP leadership's obstruction of a senate transparency bill, "brazenly insisting on an amendment that would effectively discourage groups from filing ethics complaints against senators. ... [The] amendment is obviously targeted at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has filed a number of ethics complaints of late against Republican senators, such as senators David Vitter (R-LA), Ted Stevens (R-AK), and Larry Craig (R-ID)."

Of course, given that the GOP is in agreement that Craig, and Craig alone, ought to face an ethics investigation, one inevitably wonders if this legislation isn't also to protect themselves from further exposure of what appears to be stunning and unjustifiable hypocrisy. As long as those pesky watchdogs keep filing ethics complaints, the GOP's picking and choosing which ones deserve response will be increasingly harder to defend.

It's already hard to imagine that the explanation is not simply as straightforward as CREW's Executive Director Melanie Sloan suggests: "[B]oth men have admitted to committing misdemeanor crimes that reflect poorly upon the Senate and both should be treated equally. The only possible interpretation of the Republicans' differing reaction to the two cases is that Senator Craig's case involves gay sex. Apparently soliciting for heterosexual sex does not offend the 'family values' platform in the way that soliciting for gay sex does."

Apparently not.