On Thursday, most of the attention on Capitol Hill was focused on Senator Al Franken falling on his sword and resigning in the face of multiple accusations that he fondled women both before and during his tenure in the Senate. But an even more bizarre story has played out over the last 48 hours in the House.
Hours after Franken announced his resignation, word got out that Trent Franks, the seven-term Republican congressman from Arizona’s 8th District, was about to resign amid complaints that he harassed two of his female staffers about being a surrogate mother to his wife’s child. That afternoon, Franks announced that he would resign in January 2018 due to having inadvertently “caused distress” for his staffers after asking two of his aides to be surrogates.
While the House Ethics Committee had begun an investigation, Speaker Paul Ryan had already made up his mind. When Ryan confronted Franks with the allegations last week, he told–not asked–Franks to resign.
The story took another turn on Friday, when Franks announced his immediate resignation. KNXV-TV in Phoenix broke the story; watch here.
Officially, Franks opted to speed up his resignation in the wake of his wife being admitted to the hospital. The truth, however, was somewhat dicier. It turns out that a number of outlets had gotten wind of just how lurid the allegations were–and why Ryan moved quickly to push Franks out.
According to Politico, Republican sources close to the ethics investigation said that Franks approached the aides about surrogacy in a manner that led them to believe he wanted to impregnate them. It’s not clear whether the women thought he was angling for intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks’ wife of 37 years, Josephine, has long been concerned that she is infertile, and she and her husband have long championed surrogacy. One staffer claimed that Franks deliberately cut off her access to him after she spurned him.
According to The Associated Press, Franks offered one of the aides $5 million to carry his child, and pushed her about it repeatedly. According to another staffer, Franks tried to convince an aide to read an article about how one feels when they’re in love.
According to a statement from Ryan’s office, the matter broke in full two weeks ago, when a mutual friend of one of Franks’ staffers told him about Franks’ “troubling behavior.” According to CNN, that friend was Andrea Lafferty, president of the Traditional Values Coalition. Lafferty said that she was outraged that “somebody who purports to be a conservative and a Christian” would behave in this way.
Last Tuesday, the staffer shared her story with Ryan’s general counsel, and her account was corroborated by a third party. Ryan was notified on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Ryan called Franks in to discuss the matter. When Franks “did not deny” the allegations, Ryan told Franks that he had to go. Within hours of Politico making an inquiry about the allegations, Franks announced he was leaving immediately. According to veteran Arizona political consultant Stan Barnes, Franks had no choice, since he had created a situation that was “not survivable politically.”
Franks had represented western Phoenix, Glendale, and the West Valley since 2003. He made a name for himself as a line-drawing social conservative–which makes the reports he was trying to impregnate his staffers even more staggering. It also makes his stated reason for resigning–concern that the “current cultural and media climate” would make a fair hearing impossible–sound downright insulting.
Ryan says that he has an obligation to ensure that the House is “a safe workplace.” If he was willing to move this decisively with Franks, why isn’t he willing to do so with another problem child in his caucus, Blake Farenthold of Texas? You’ll recall that Farenthold agreed to pay an $84,000 settlement to a former staffer who claimed he harassed her–or, more accurately, had taxpayers pay the settlement. While Farenthold remains in Congress, that staffer has been unable to find a decent job.
If Ryan is truly serious about making the House “a safe workplace,” he would have given Farenthold the same treatment that he gave Franks. And we should demand no less from Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. There is no place for this sort of behavior in the people’s house. Period.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
