Opinion: Bathroom guilty plea raises political pressure on Sen. Craig

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While a growing number of prominent Republicans called for his outright resignation, Idaho’s beleaguered Sen. Larry Craig relinquished all his committee assignments today, as requested by senior party leaders. The same leaders are seeking a formal investigation by the Senate ethics committee.

Craig, who pleaded guilty this month to disorderly conduct after being arrested for lewd conduct in a men’s room of the Minneapolis airport in June, has come under increasing political fire from colleagues. Sens. Norm Coleman and John McCain and Rep. Pete Hoekstra today called publicly for Craig to resign.

‘When you plead guilty to a crime,’ McCain told CNN, ‘then you shouldn’t serve.’ On the Jay Leno show last night McCain was even more forceful: ‘It’s disgraceful, and the people of Idaho will make a pretty rapid verdict in this situation.’ On the other hand, one of Craig’s Democratic colleagues, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a presidential candidate, urged the public watching CNN to give Craig ‘a little space here to defend himself.’

Yesterday in an emotional news conference, covered here, Craig sought to defend himself against ‘a witch hunt’ by the Idaho Statesman newspaper. He vehemently denied he was gay and said he regretted his guilty plea and was reviewing his legal options, which seem to be few, according to a story by The Times’ Richard Schmitt on this website and in Thursday’s print editions.

Reporting from Boise, The Times’ Tomas Alex Tizon has another story with reaction back home.

Meanwhile, John McArdle of the Roll Call newspaper, a subscriber-only website that first broke the arrest story Monday, reports on how the arrest of such a prominent person escaped notice for nearly three months. A Minneapolis police spokeswoman said that while the department realized it had captured a famous person as one of 40 arrested in a monthlong sweep of that men’s room, it handled all of the arrests in the same routine manner, which does not involve issuing news releases.

--Andrew Malcolm