One year after news of Rep. Mark Foley's sexually explicit e-mails rocked the congressional page program, officials, pages and their parents say the program is safer than ever.
House officials have added a bunch of new safety provisions to ensure the teenage pages are well protected and secure. Those provisions include a 10 p.m. curfew on weekdays, a midnight curfew on weekends, constant adult supervision, a buddy system and a "sign-out" process when pages want to the leave their dorms.
In the wake of the Foley scandal, President Bush signed into law the House Page Board Revision Act, adding more members of Congress to the page board and including a parent and a former page on the panel.
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Philip Turner, a spokesman for Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., a page board member, said one of the problems with the old page board was its infrequent meetings resulting in a lack of communication between members.
Turner said the pages "just weren't a priority," which "made it harder to monitor the program."
Now, a year later, Kyle Anderson, a spokesman for the Office of House Administration, said, his office is pleased with the way the page board is functioning.
"If there's oversight, you can catch these things and prevent them from happening," Anderson said.
One has to wonder why Capito, who was on the page-board then too and formed a political action committee with Foley, did nothing about the "infrequent meetings" of the board before Foley's behavior was exposed in 2006.
Congressional oversight is one of the important roles the Democrats have brought back to Congress that was sorely lacking under a Republican majority.
