Two years after Representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) stepped down from Congress due to a sex scandal involving House pages, his Democratic successor has become embroiled in a scandal of his own.
Freshman Rep. Tim Mahoney, who won a slim 49-48 percent victory over Foley's replacement, Joe Negron, in 2006, is accused of paying former mistress and staffer Patricia Allen more than $121,000 in hush money, according to ABC News.
Tim Mahoney is a man whose own ads in 2006 stated that he was "a commonsense businessman who believes in faith, family and personal responsibility.'' According to reports from ABC, his affair began during the 2006 campaign.
First of all, the arrogance of such an arrangement is staggering; that a man running to replace a politician who was forced out of Congress for lewd behavior was engaging in an extra-marital affair (several affairs, according to Allen's past statements) even at the time of his campaign is a mind-bending rollercoaster of duplicity.
Mahoney has called for an ethics inquiry into his own behavior, even as reports are surfacing that Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the current occupant of that office, confronted him about reports that he had been unfaithful to his wife, spoke to him about his responsibility as an elected official and urged him to come clean with his constituents.
During a profanity-laced phone conversation with Allen regarding her dismissal, Mahoney apparently threatened to withhold her last paycheck if she disclosed her story to the public.
"And guess what?" Mahoney can allegedly be heard saying to Allen. "The only person that matters is, guess who? Me."
With all due respect to his massive ego, Rep. Mahoney is sadly mistaken.
When the people of Florida's 16th district elected Mahoney to represent them in Congress, they placed in him a sacred trust. What he has done is childish, disgusting and stupid. He should be ashamed of himself.
At the time of Foley's resignation just over two years ago, the former congressman stated that he was going into "rehab" — that time-honored rest home for scandal-plagued politicians — to cure himself of homosexuality, or alcoholism, or pedophilia or whatever loathsome contractible addiction he convinced himself he had.
As of press time, Mahoney had not declared what "disease" he himself was suffering from at the time of these immensely hypocritical actions. But we at the Daily hope that Mahoney checks into this proverbial "rehab" — and gets the hell out of Washington.
