The Double Legal Standard

Blast Off! asks a question on the minds of many these days.

Why are Republicans more scandalous than Democrats?

I put my two cents in over at the Florida Progressive Coalition, citing an article I read this weekend--Craig Case: Congressional Arrogance at Work--that helps address the Blast Off! question.

Chief Washington correspondent and Inside Congress author Ronald Kessler writes:

Watching Sen. Larry E. Craig’s press conference about his encounter with a police officer in an airport men’s room, I wondered how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could credibly claim that his only mistake was to plead guilty to the charge stemming from the seamy incident.

Then I remembered "unarresting." Unarresting is not a term you will find in any law. It’s not in any dictionary. But it’s a term known to every officer of the Capitol Police.

Unarresting is what happens when a Capitol Police officer has the misfortune to learn, after having made an arrest, that the person charged is a member of Congress. In that case, a supervisor is called, and he drives the member of Congress home. No record is made of the arrest. In other words, it is covered up.

Of course, if a Capitol Police officer learns before an arrest that the suspect is a member of Congress, the process is much simpler: He never makes the arrest in the first place.

(...)

If you find a member doing something wrong, you unarrest him,” said Edward P. Percival, another former Capitol Police officer. “It happens all the time.”

“It was common practice to unarrest people because they were powerful or someone powerful intervened,” Terry Coons, a former Capitol Police officer, said. “You always considered what you were going to do with the idea, ‘If I arrest this person, what will happen later? What will the consequences of an arrest be on me?'”

“Congress never wanted the Capitol Police to be so professional that they would have the ability to investigate [the members],” former Capitol Police Sgt. John A. Gott told me. “If they kept us as their little private guards, we would never be a threat.”

(...)

“The ego and the arrogance of some of the members had an impact on me,” John R. Niston, a former Capitol Police officer, told me. “They get to the point where they think the people in the country exist to serve them instead of the other way around.”

Read more here.

***

In the Frog's opinion, the consequences of years of unarrests–a practice that definitely crosses party lines–hits those Republicans that espouse family values and rewrite the law to legislate the moral high road for the rest of us--much, much harder.

When it hits the fan, the word hypocrite adheres to that elected official forever.

Helps explain why Mark Foley has not yet been charged, doesn't it?