Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Craig Flip Flops on Resigning

From the AP:

Sen. Larry Craig is reconsidering his decision to resign after his arrest in a Minnesota airport sex sting and may still fight for his Senate seat, his spokesman said Tuesday evening.

"It's not such a foregone conclusion anymore, that the only thing he could do was resign," Sidney Smith, Craig's spokesman in Idaho's capital, told The Associated Press.

"We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight — and stay in the Senate," Smith said.

Craig, a Republican who has represented Idaho in Congress for 27 years, announced Saturday that he intends to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30. But since then, he's hired a prominent lawyer to investigate the possibility of reversing his plea, his spokesman said.

Craig was a no-show Tuesday as Congress reconvened after a summer break and it wasn't clear whether he'll return at all since deciding to resign over his guilty plea in a sex sting this summer at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport...



I held out about posting about this till now mainly because the circumstances that led up to Craig's arrest really weren't conviction worthy. Strange and questionable but not criminal. However his decision to plead guilty followed by his apparent decision to recant his resignation do show the beginnings of a pattern of poor judgment. I say this primarily because given the facts of the arrest a third year law student probably could have gotten the charges dropped. Additionally declaring one's resignation and then recanting is exactly the kind of hypocrisy that the public would expect from someone who holds themselves up as a "family values" political leader who then goes and solicits sex in a public lavatory.

However it also occurs to me that had the GOP not already been rocked by sexual and other scandals as of late then Craig might not have been so quick to plead guilty . After all in the court of public opinion there are no dismissals.