Consistency does not restrain Larry Craig

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has just discovered the essence of Larry Craig.

Whatever the former Idaho senator says today may be entirely different from what he said a year or five years ago. The only constant is what serves the interests of Larry Craig.

Case in point is the question Craig's lawyers argued in Jackson's court this week. They want Jackson to bounce the Federal Election Commission's lawsuit against the Idaho Republican.

The unanimous FEC says Craig - and not the people who in good faith contributed money to a 2008 re-election campaign he never waged - should cough up the $217,000 his lawyers spent trying to erase the 2007 conviction that closed - and at least to a national audience, defined - his political career.

In June 2007, Craig was arrested in a gay sex sting operation at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In early August of that year, he quietly pleaded guilty to a charge of disturbing the peace. When the story became public, Craig announced his "intent" to step down from office.

Then he changed his tune. The resignation was off and Craig's lawyers went to court arguing a man smart enough to get elected five times to the U.S. House and three times to the U.S. Senate was somehow duped into signing a guilty plea. Before the Minnesota courts rejected that appeal, Craig had burned through the campaign cash to pay his lawyers.

To the key question - was Craig acting in an official capacity when he was arrested - the Idaho Republican has shifted his response.

Back in 2008, when the Senate Ethics Committee was nosing around, Craig said what happened in the airport rest room was "purely personal conduct unrelated to the performance of official Senate duties" and therefore none of the ethics panel's concern. The ethics panel didn't buy it and ultimately issued a letter of admonition against the Idaho Republican.

Now, of course, Craig is telling the FEC something entirely different. When he was in Minneapolis, Craig says he was on official business and therefore he's entitled to convert campaign funds toward his legal defense.

All of which did not escape Jackson's attention.

"I'm supposed to ignore that (what Craig told the ethics committee)?" Jackson asked Craig's lawyer, Andrew D. Herman.

Well, yes, your honor.

Moreover, in the nearly six years since his toe-tapping escapade occurred, Craig has decided to claim the mantle of hero - at least to other members of the House and Senate who also used campaign funds to fend off legal issues.

"We're not asking for anything the FEC hasn't granted before," Herman told McClatchy Newspapers last month.

That puts Craig in company with:

• Former Congressman Gary Condit, D-Calif., who spent more than $100,000 in campaign funds on attorneys during the 2001 Chandra Levy case.
• Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who used more than $300,000 from his campaign coffers to hire attorneys during his own ethics scandal.
• Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who sought and got permission to spend campaign funds for lawyers who defended him while the House ethics panel and Justice Department investigated his conduct with male House pages in 1996.

Of course, this is the same Larry Craig who, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, called Bill Clinton a "nasty, bad, naughty boy."

All of which leads to the inevitable question: What will Craig say or do next?

Whatever he has to. - M.T.