Norton Says Don't Make Page Program a Victim of the Foley Scandal - October 6, 2006

Norton Says Don't Make Page Program a Victim of the Foley Scandal
October 6, 2006

Washington, DC-- Amid calls by some members of Congress and others to suspend or abolish the congressional page program, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who has nominated three pages from the District in past years, said that the worst outcome of the scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) and apparent Republican leadership negligence in protecting the pages would be to punish pages by abolishing the program that provides "a valuable once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity." Norton said what Congress should do is to meet its obligation to pages and their families by immediately making new safeguards operational, beginning with communications and contacts between members of Congress and others with pages. "We need to do our job, not punish pages who have always done theirs with cheerfulness and excellence," she said. "As pages come forward in reports to the press, it is apparent that they have been the grown-ups in this scandal. It is they who have shown maturity and judgment in resisting what some of them took to be inappropriate advances or communications." She said that the public would not know about the scandal at all if a page had not come forward to report his concerns to his parents. "The failure in judgment lies here and only here in the Congress and punitive consequences, if any, should be confined to members or others found to be responsible." Norton said that she continues to hear calls to abolish the page program but was pleased that Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), to whom some early reports had attributed this suggestion, apparently has reconsidered.