LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – Larry Craig has infuriated his GOP colleagues by deciding he may stay in office if he can undo his guilty plea to men’s room sex charges, the New York Daily News reports.
“If he comes back, he’ll be a leper and a pariah,” a top party operative complained yesterday. “This is the ultimate in personal arrogance.”
The conservative Republican had said he intended to step down by Sept. 30 after news broke of his encounter in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.
“I thought he made the correct decision, the difficult but correct decision to resign,” said clearly unhappy Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) after speaking with Craig yesterday. “That would still be my view today.”
Craig, 62, called McConnell to say he’ll stay in office to fight a Senate ethics investigation if a judge will let him withdraw his guilty plea.
If Craig can manage the tough task of reversing that plea, he’d be trashed politically anyway, observers said. GOP officials declined to express their unhappiness on the record, but many said he should just go.
Craig apparently decided to fight after Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) suggested Sunday the case against him is weak.
“It’s virtually impossible for an objective observer not to conclude that the senator was in that bathroom cruising for gay sex,” said Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance. “By his reconsideration, he’s extended the shelf life of this thing.”
Craig won support from the unlikely figure of Bill Clinton, a man Craig attacked repeatedly when Clinton was President, at one point calling him a “naughty boy.”
Clinton told CNN’s Larry King he felt no joy to see one of his tormentors destroyed and exposed as a hypocrite.
