Until this week, Nevada Sen. John Ensign was the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, making him the fourth-highest ranking Republican senator. Then came the revelation, on Tuesday, that he had an affair with a campaign staffer who was married to a man working in his Senate office. On Wednesday, Ensign resigned from his leadership role, though he remains in his seat.
For now, though, this will probably be the extent of the fallout from Ensign’s disclosure. At this point, a standard-issue affair like this one isn’t huge news, certainly not enough to make him consider resigning from the Senate altogether. It might put a damper on the career of a man once seen as a rising star, though, and it will hurt any chance of his winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, which he seemed to be considering a run at.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., flew home Tuesday. He had to miss a vote on a bill that impacts Nevada to do it, but he had good reason for doing so: Ensign was back In Las Vegas so that he could hold a press conference at which he acknowledged having an extramarital affair, reportedly with a former campaign staffer.
“I deeply regret and am sorry for my actions,” Ensign said in a statement given to reporters. His wife, Darlene, is standing by him — in a statement of her own, she said, “With the help of our family and close friends our marriage has become stronger.” She added, “I love my husband.”
The affair went on from December 2007 until August 2008, and was with a woman who worked for the senator’s re-election campaign and his political action committee, the Washington Post reports. The woman’s husband worked in Ensign’s Senate office.
Politico reports that the affair began after Ensign separated from his wife, and that when the couple reconciled, he broke it off with the staffer — and gave her a severance package. But, the paper reports, the woman’s husband later asked for “a substantial sum of money.” This could explain the timing of the announcement, which came fairly suddenly and wasn’t made at the traditional time for breaking bad news — generally, a Friday afternoon, not a Tuesday.
The immediate political impact of the news is unclear. Given the precedent set by, among others, Sens. David Vitter and Larry Craig, Ensign can probably keep his seat without too much trouble, assuming there’s no further fallout from the story. And at the press conference, he announced his intention to remain in the Senate. The senator had also been considered a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, something that now seems very unlikely.
At the very least, the revelation will prove embarrassing because of Ensign’s own history of moralizng. As David Weigel observes, while in the House, Ensign voted to impeach then-President Clinton. More recently, in a speech about same-sex marriage on the Senate floor, he declared, “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied.”
Conservative politicians looking for pork in the latest omnibus spending bill got one pretty literal example handed right to them: a $1.79 million appropriation for “swine odor and manure management research” in Iowa. Not ones to look a gift horse — or any other kind of livestock — in the mouth, they’ve been running with it.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Twittered about the money. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, called it “$1.7 million to take the stink out of manure.” And Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., took to the floor of the Senate to say, “Now, I’m a veterinarian by profession. I understand that pigs smell and pig farms smell worse than almost anything else, but when did it become the responsibility of the federal government to control pig odor?
Other people, like the Christian Science Monitor’s Jimmy Orr, have joked about it too. “The good news is if you have a problem with pig odor, the $1.7 million investment is sure to take care of the issue and then it’ll be money well spent,” Orr wrote. “Imagine a world without pig odor. That’s change we can believe in.”
I’ll be the first to admit this is pretty funny stuff. Imagine, spending almost $2 million to study the fact that pigs smell?
Of course, if any of these people actually bothered to go back and do a little research about what they were discussing, they’d know it’s not really funny after all. Pig odor is more than just a smell; it’s dangerous stuff that cause serious health problems, both physical and mental, in people. It can even contribute to asthma in children.
One study of people living near large hog farms in North Carolina, for instance, concluded “persons exposed to odors from intensive hog operations experienced ‘more tension, more depression, more anger, more fatigue and more confusion’ than a group of unexposed persons.”
A 1998 workshop about the subject, held at Duke University and featuring 50 experts, came to the conclusion that “Our current state of knowledge clearly suggests that it is possible for odorous emissions from animal operations, wastewater treatment, and recycling of biosolids to have an impact on physical health. The most frequently reported symptoms attributed to odors include eye, nose, and throat irritation, headache, nausea, hoarseness, cough, nasal congestion, palpitations, shortness of breath, stress, drowsiness, and alterations of mood.”
And here are the conclusions from one study, from Iowa no less, that compared people living near pig farms (CAFOs) with a control group not exposed to livestock odor:
[N]eighbors of the swine operation reported significantly higher rates of four clusters of symptoms previously documented to represent toxic or inflammatory effects of the respiratory tract among confinement workers. One cluster reported by swine CAFO neighbors includes symptoms such as coughing, sputum
production, breath shortness, chest tightness, and wheezing. A second cluster includes symptoms of nausea, weakness, and feelings of dizziness. A third cluster consists of headaches and plugged ears, while a fourth cluster encompassed symptoms of a runny nose, scratchy throat, and burning eyes. Most notable is the fact that for the first time the configuration of respiratory symptoms among neighbors was documented to be consistent with the scientifically well-established pattern of respiratory health problems among swine confinement workers discussed previously.
