Washington, DC- Today Representative Kirsten Gillibrand announced the passage of a bill on reforming the Congressional Page Board [HR 475]. The legislation comes in response to the shocking abuse of the page system highlighted last year in the Foley scandal.

In the last Congress Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned from office under a cloud of allegations regarding the sending of sexually suggestive messages to underage male pages. During the investigation of these allegations, the bipartisan House Ethics Committee criticized several House Members and senior staffers for not doing enough. The bipartisan Ethics Committee report said that the Page Board, which oversees the page program, met rarely even as reports of Rep. Foley's misbehavior toward pages circulated for years. (The board met only twice in 2006, once right after Foley resigned on Sept. 29, once in 2005, and twice in 2004.) Further, the report found that Rep. Shimkus (the head of the Page Board) failed to tell the two other members of the Page Board about Foley's conduct.

Representative Gillibrand stated today, "As a Member of Congress, protecting the young people who serve as our pages is a priority. For more than 150 years, young people from across the country have come to Washington to serve as pages in the U.S. Capitol. The Page Board School is a national institution, and the parents who send their young people off to Congress should have every assurance and confidence in this program."

The bill that passed does the following:

• Makes the Page Board Fully Bipartisan -- Adds a House Member to the Board to make it 2 Republicans appointed by Minority Leader and 2 Democrats appointed by the Speaker. (Currently, it is 2 majority Members and 1 minority). This will remove partisanship as a consideration in dealing with complaints against House Members.

• Reflects Page and Parent Concerns -- Adds a former page and the parent of a person who is or has been a page in the past 5 years to the Board -- both to be appointed jointly by the Speaker and Minority Leader. It also authorizes the House to pay travel expenses for the new Board members who are not Members of the House.

• Requires Regular Meetings of the Page Board, as determined by the Speaker and the Minority Leader, as called for by the bipartisan Ethics Committee in reporting on the Foley matter. The Ethics Committee report said that more frequent meetings of the Page Board would force the Clerk of the House to provide more reports about the program.

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