This is rich: Former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig (R-Forever Footsie) is now claiming that US taxpayers should foot (so to speak) the legal bills he paid fending off his 2007 sex-sting arrest in a Minneapolis airport men’s room.
From the Associated Press (via the Boston Globe):
Ex-senator says bathroom trip was Senate business
BOISE, Idaho — Larry Craig, former Republican senator, aims to fend off a federal election lawsuit against him by arguing his infamous July 11, 2007, Minneapolis airport bathroom visit that ended in his sex-sting arrest was part of his official Senate business.
Craig is hoping to avoid repaying $217,000 in campaign funds the Federal Election Commission asserts he misused to defend himself.
Craig says those expenditures “[fall] under his official, reimbursable duties as senator because he was traveling between Idaho and the nation’s capital for work. He cites a Senate rule in which reimbursable per diem expenses include charges for bathrooms.”
The hardsnorting staff is pretty sure that Senate rule was intended to cover the quarters you insert into bathroom cubicles, not a nearly quarter-million-dollar defense based on having a wide stance in them.
Then again, we’ve never been in the Minneapolis airport.
Campaign Outsider 
Wow, what a snollygoster.
I was in Minneapolis for a conference back in 1998. Being a woman I did not check out the stalls in the men’s room, but the woman’s stalls were a decent size. Trust me you have not missed anything. It was full of advertisements for the Mall of America. There was (and still is I suspect) a regular transport service between the airport and the Mall. One thing I did notice was how racist and flat out mean the city was. From the airport taxi driver who let me know that “people like me were at fault for what was wrong with the country”. I guess the Boston accent freaked him out. There was a surprising lack of diversity, bad enough that this white chick from Everett noticed how white every one was. It still did not help me communicate, my accent was so strange.
If I ever wind up in one of the Minneapolis airport men’s rooms, you’ll be the second to know, Jan.
Prediction: this will get a good few rounds of jokes tonight on the Daily Show and Colbert Report. You know, like: “The Senate’s official business is a pile of shit.” Or, “Flushing the Senate’s business down the toilet.”
Reblogged this on Ozymandias and commented:
Just… wow.