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The Picture of Dennis Hastert

The disgraced former congressman was a better representative of the GOP than the party would like to admit.

Former House speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois attending the unveiling of his portrait at the Capitol on July 28, 2009, in Washington, DC.

The obituaries for former Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert, who died over the weekend, all led with the scandal that justly stained his name at the end of his career—charges of child sexual abuse dating from his tenure as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, in the 1960s and ’70s. After his subsequent resignation, Hastert was convicted on charges of bank fraud stemming from efforts to conceal a series of hush-money payments to one of his former victims; in 2016, he was sentenced to a 15-month prison term, but was released on medical grounds several weeks before serving it out. 

Shortly after Hastert pleaded guilty to the fraud charges, then–Republican Speaker Paul Ryan had his official portrait removed from the Capitol, signaling the GOP’s determination to treat the disgraced party leader as a bad apple—an unfortunate behavioral outlier—best forgotten.

But Hastert’s horrifying predatory past wasn’t his only baleful contribution to our political scene. As a rising GOP power broker, Hastert followed the scorched-earth model of politics practiced by his mentor, former majority leader Tom DeLay. DeLay became majority whip in 1994, and set about transforming the GOP conference into a machine running on ideological orthodoxy and corrupt infusions of cash. His signature innovation was an initiative called the “K Street Project”—a bid to transform the DC lobbying industry into a subsidiary of the Republican Party, demanding that favored firms heighten their PAC contributions to the GOP while stiffing the Democratic opposition. DeLay, who graduated to majority leader in 2003, became a casualty of his own corruptionist political vision; in 2005, a Travis County grand jury indicted him on charges of money laundering, and he resigned from office a year later. He was also a close confrere of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, also later jailed on fraud and corruption charges, taking the K Street........

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