Durbin: Shimkus should resign from page board

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October 2, 2006

BY DENNIS CONRAD Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said Monday that GOP Rep. John Shimkus should resign as head of the House board that supervises congressional pages, due to his conduct in a scandal that led a Florida Republican to quit Congress.

The Illinois senator, who previously held the seat now occupied by Shimkus, also said the House should abolish its page board comprised of three lawmakers and replace it with one having only non-elected officials, like the Senate model.

The House page board is at the eye of a political storm just weeks before the Nov. 7 general elections, after information surfaced Friday that Rep. Mark Foley exchanged lurid Internet messages with former teenage pages.

Foley abruptly resigned Friday, but Democrats since have raised questions about whether Shimkus and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., knew earlier about Foley's alleged conduct and what they did to stop it.

''The fact of the matter is at the highest levels of the leadership in the House of Representatives they have known for months that something awful was happening,'' Durbin, the Senate's second-highest ranking Democrat, said Monday after an unrelated appearance at a Chicago high school.

''What they did was to try to contain it or cover it up,'' he said. ''They tried to protect themselves instead of trying to protect these pages, and now is the day of reckoning.''

Shimkus and Hastert, at a Capitol news conference, read separate statements declaring that they did not know until Friday about the most lurid messages Foley allegedly sent to interns in 2003.

Shimkus later said in a taped phone message for reporters that in 2005 he learned from the House clerk's office -- after it was informed by Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La. -- of allegations that Foley sent messages to a former Louisiana page, inquiring about the boy's health after Hurricane Katrina and asking for a photo.

Shimkus, a West Point graduate and father of three boys, said he interpreted the message as Foley ''simply acting as a mentor.'' But he said he did tell Foley to cease contact with the boy and ''be mindful'' of contacts with past and present pages. He said he had heard of no further complaints.

Durbin countered that Shimkus, when he supposedly first learned about Foley's alleged conduct, did not share the information with other House page board members, including its lone Democrat, Rep. Dale E. Kildee of Michigan.

''We've always been nonpartisan -- not even bipartisan -- nonpartisan, and to be excluded from a meeting of such importance where the safety of the pages was such in question, I found that really outrageous,'' Kildee said.

Centralia Councilman Danny Stover, the Democratic candidate for Shimkus' House seat in south-central Illinois, also called on Shimkus to resign from the House page board, saying Shimkus' actions looked like a coverup.

''Simply calling Mr. Foley and asking him if he'd done anything wrong and taking his word for it is not an investigation,'' Stover said at a Springfield news conference. ''He should have demanded to see the e-mails and demanded to know if there were other such communications, looked into it further, and not taken him at his word.''

Statements made by Shimkus about Foley and his interest in pages have appeared in the Congressional Record several times over the years, including in June 2001, when he described the Florida congressman as a person who ''has a vested interest in taking time out to make sure he talks with you and visits with you and he gets to know you.''

Hastert said no Republican leader in Congress was aware of the alleged 2003 exchanges until Friday, when ABC News reported it had questioned Foley about them. He said Foley had ''duped a lot of people.''

''The instant messages Mark Foley reportedly sent to a former page are deplorable,'' added Shimkus, reading from a prepared statement. ''When I heard of these instant messages ... the very thought of this behavior made me sick. Mark Foley should be ashamed.''

Shimkus said new measures would be implemented to keep pages safe, including a toll-free hot line that would allow anyone to report incidents.

''I'll be working with members of the page board and others from both inside and outside of Congress to make sure the pages are safe both when they are here and when they return home,'' he said. ''I am determined to do everything that we can to make sure that this kind of incident will never happen again.''

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Associated Press writers John O'Connor in Springfield, Ill., and Ken Thomas in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.