December 09, 2017 09:54 AM UTC

At Least He's Not Your Creepshow Ex-Congressman

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Washington Post reported last night, the wind-down of Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-AZ) career this week amid a bizarre allegation of sexual misconduct involving his female staff rapidly accelerated Friday as the icky details became public–turning what was expected to be a resignation within weeks into resignation effective immediately:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) offered a female staff member $5 million if she would bear his child, said a woman who helped bring the matter to the attention of House leaders, prompting Franks’s immediate resignation Friday.

Andrea Lafferty said she encouraged the Franks aide, who had left his office after the alleged conduct, to bring the story to the attention of the House Republican leadership and was present when the aide was interviewed last week by House lawyers.

“He offered her $5 million if she would conceive a child, that’s what she told,” said Lafferty, who is president of the Traditional Values Coalition, an advocacy group that promotes social conservative views shared by Franks.

It’s noteworthy that the far-right Traditional Values Coalition drove the bus against Rep. Franks, whose well-known president Andrea Lafferty was grossed out enough by the allegations to look past the substantial political commonality between them and call for Rep. Franks’ head:

Lafferty said she was struck by what she called the hypocrisy of Franks’s conduct: “Offering someone five million bucks is not a discussion of surrogacy,” she said Friday. “Trent Franks says that he’s a Christian and a conservative. I’m a Christian and conservative. What he did offends me. It’s not Christian, and it’s not conservative.”

Apparently she doesn’t watch Hulu.

To be clear, it’s not our intention to make any moral judgment about child surrogacy or other steps families may ethically take with other consenting adults to conceive children. Because in Rep. Franks’ case we don’t have to, despite his insistence in his resignation statement that he wasn’t looking to impregnate any surrogates the (pardon us) old-fashioned way:

The sources said Franks approached two female staffers about acting as a potential surrogate for him and his wife, who has struggled with fertility issues for years. But the aides were concerned that Franks was asking to have sexual relations with them. It was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks opposes abortion rights as well as procedures that discard embryos.

A former staffer also alleged that Franks tried to persuade a female aide that they were in love by having her read an article that described how a person knows they’re in love with someone, the sources said. One woman believed she was the subject of retribution after rebuffing Franks…

The old-fashioned way is so much quicker and easier than a test tube, after all.

With that, the threshold for exiting stage left has definitely been reached.