Congressional Aides

The onetime top aide to former Rep. Mark Foley testified for more than four hours Thursday before lawmakers investigating whether House GOP leaders ignored early warnings about the congressman's behavior toward teenage pages. The aide, Kirk Fordham, said last week that he had warned the office of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) about inappropriate conduct by the Florida Republican long before Foley's sexual overtures to the male congressional pages became public.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has suspended a Democratic aide's access to classified materials, citing concerns the staffer might have leaked parts of an intelligence assessment on terrorism to the media. The highly unusual move drew sharp protest from the panel's ranking Democrat, Jane Harman of Venice, who said in a statement Friday, "There is no evidence to suggest that the professional staff member in question did anything wrong."

In a coda to a year of political disasters for Republicans, the House Ethics Committee said Friday that GOP lawmakers and staff members for years remained "willfully ignorant" that former Rep. Mark Foley was making sexual advances toward male congressional pages. Driven by political considerations and fear of exposing Foley's homosexuality, they failed in their duty to protect the teenagers, the committee concluded in its report on the scandal.

In some ways, Phil Schiliro's job is similar to that of a congressman: He runs a legislative office. He helps craft legislation. He stands in for his boss, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), at meetings all over Capitol Hill. Yet deep down inside, Waxman's chief of staff has sometimes wished for an additional responsibility that even his accommodating boss can't grant him--the right to vote on the floor of the House.