CongressionalBadBoys.com | home | Massachusetts What's the Deal with Massachusetts? Is Massachusetts more enlightened, more forgiving, or just doesn't have any sense of decency when it comes to its Congressional BadBoys who have gotten into problems. In 1995, when Congress was debating what to do with Senator Bob Packwood, Senator Alan Simpson (Republican-Wyoming) said this:  "I looked around that room [the Senate chamber], and saw people who had done things much worse." Jeff Jacoby, reporter for the Boston Globe, continues: "Now which senior senator from Massachusetts do you suppose he was referring to?  If you're looking for double standards in the way members of Congress who behave sleazily are treated, Massachusetts is certainly the place to focus." "When a U.S. Senator or representative from any other state is disgraced by sexual corruption, he leaves Congress.  Always.  Either he resigns or he is thrown out by his constituents.  Powerful chairman [Wilbur Mills, Wayne Hays], or lowly backbencher [Dan Crane, Mel Reynolds, Gus Savage, Tom Evans, Ernie Konnyu, Jim Bates], Republican or Democrat, gay [Bob Bauman] or straight, it makes no difference:  Soil your reputation with sexual scandal, and you kiss your congressional career goodbye. . . . "Everywhere but Massachusetts. "Twelve years after he was censured by the House of Representatives for propositioning three male teenage House pages and having sex with one of them, Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds is still in Congress.  He has never expressed contrition for what he did, never shown a hint of same.  Worse, he has always insisted that his actions--getting a kid 19 years his junior drunk on vodka and cranberry juice, then pressuring him into unwanted sex--did not constitute improper sexual conduct, that the whole business was 'mutual and voluntary.'  Disgrace?  Not in Massachusetts.  Studds is routinely re-elected.  [He retired from Congress in 1996 and died in 2006]. "So is Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, whose affair with Steve Gobie, an $80-a-pop call boy, was revealed in 1989.  Renting a hooker was the least of the offense.  It turned out that Gobie was a convicted felon with a prison record.  That he ran a prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment.  That Frank made him a personal aide, paying him $20,000--unreported to the IRS--and giving him the keys to his car.  That he wrote letters of reference to Gobie's probation officers.  That he had Gobie accompany him to public functions--once, even, to a White House ceremony.  Most pathetic of all was Frank's claim that he'd been 'victimized'--that he was just a 'good liberal' who was 'trying to help' Gobie but got 'suckered.' . . . "Which returns us to the Bay State's senior senator.  How can a U.S. Senate in which Bob Packwood isn't fit to serve have room for an Edward Kennedy? . . . . "However crude Packwood's behavior, it pales beside the lecherous exploitation of women for which Kennedy is notorious.  If Packwood is too gross to be a senator, so is Kennedy. "Except that Kennedy is from Massachusetts, so his swinish antics have never been a problem.  Maybe in Oregon or Illinois, depravity can cost a congressman his seat.  In Massachusetts, where standards are lower, sleaziness is a bar to nothing." Source:  Jeff Jacoby, "If Packwood Disgraces the Senate, What Does Kennedy Do?"  Tampa Tribune, September 15, 1995, 15.