Two Nevada Republicans Call for Ensign to Bow Out

Two Nevada Republicans Call for Ensign to Bow Out
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/us/politics/09ensign.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — Senator John Ensign’s political troubles worsened Thursday as more Republican colleagues from his home state of Nevada said that the ethics investigations surrounding him have threatened to damage the party statewide.

Two Republican leaders in Las Vegas called Thursday for Mr. Ensign to resign, a day after Representative Dean Heller, a Republican from northern Nevada, said that the ethics inquiries were causing “real problems” for party members around the state.

Their comments came on the heels of a front-page article Monday in The Las Vegas Sun that read much like a political obituary. It said Nevada Republicans were upset “that Ensign seems oblivious to the collateral damage caused by his actions, and unwilling to make the matter disappear by resigning.”

Mr. Ensign was considered a rising Republican star and a possible presidential contender in 2012 until he admitted publicly last year to an affair with an aide’s wife.

Mr. Ensign’s office said Thursday that he was traveling in South Asia with a bipartisan Congressional delegation and that the office had no immediate comment on the concerns voiced by Nevada Republicans.

Both the Justice Department and the Senate ethics committee are investigating allegations first raised in The New York Times last October that Mr. Ensign got lobbying work for the aide, Douglas Hampton, and intervened on behalf of his clients in an effort to contain the damage from his affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife.

The senator’s efforts to help Mr. Hampton could be seen as a violation of a one-year moratorium on senior Congressional staffers lobbying their former employers, legal analysts say. The Justice Department is also examining a $96,000 payment that Mr. Ensign’s parents made to the Hamptons.

As new allegations of potential improper lobbying have surfaced in recent weeks against Mr. Ensign, Republican colleagues in Washington and Nevada have remained largely silent, and associates say Mr. Ensign has found himself more isolated politically.

A number of onetime allies in Nevada, including some who received grand jury subpoenas for documents about their dealings with Mr. Ensign, have also said that they felt used by the senator after he turned to them for help in finding lobbying work for Mr. Hampton without disclosing the affair.

In a column posted Thursday on a political Web site, Nevada News and Views, Richard Scotti, former chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, and Swadeep Nigam, former treasurer, said it was time for Mr. Ensign to resign.

“Nobody is coming to his rescue,” they wrote. “Only a small handful of Republican candidates have even sought his endorsement.”

They said the negative publicity had already damaged Republican fund-raising efforts in Nevada and threatened to drag down Republican candidates in the November election. In appearances on Las Vegas news shows on Wednesday, Mr. Heller, the Republican congressman who has been seen as a potential successor to Mr. Ensign, stopped short of calling for the senator’s resignation but said that Mr. Ensign’s “situation” had hurt “the ticket up and down” the state.

He called on Mr. Ensign to publicly answer the ethics questions.

“Let’s get this behind us,” Mr. Heller said in one television appearance. “Let’s move forward. It’s not good for him, it’s not good for me, it’s not good for the Republican Party, it’s not good for the state of Nevada.”

The office of the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, asked Thursday about Mr. Ensign’s political future in light of the criticism, had no immediate comment.