If there's one thing I know re: Hastert's court case (in which he just plead Guilty to lying to the FBI) it's this:
If a Dem speaker who wrote the book on how to run the modern House had legal troubles, the GOP would be tying those troubles together with his legacy.
I'm referring to The Hastert Rule. The Hastert Rule, as described on Wikipedia is:
... an informal governing principle used by Republican Speakers of the House of Representatives since the mid-1990s to maintain their speakerships and limit the power of the minority party to bring bills up for a vote on the floor of the House. So here we have a new (vulnerable, impressionable) Speaker entering the job, PROMISING to keep the Hastert Rule in place, and no one on the Dem side has thought to call him on that? No one has thought to say, "You're going to preserve the House of Representatives that was crafted by a child molester who paid off his victim and lied to the FBI about it!"?Yes, there are moral caveats here. No question. But any narrative that could derail the Hastert Rule is a moral victory.