ArcaMax

WASHINGTON -- It feels some days as if the ordinary laws of political physics have been suspended. Politics operates by unseen but generally predictable forces. Go too far and the mechanism of political gravity will bring you down.

Not now. Not reliably, anyway. This unsettling development has manifested itself, most recently, in the otherwise far different cases of Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens.

The Pruitt situation involves greed, entitlement and ethical obtuseness. The Greitens matter involves sex, entitlement and moral obtuseness. But they are linked by the principal actors' convictions that the usual political rules have become inoperative and that they can somehow survive the storm of outrage.

In any normal administration, at any normal time, Pruitt would have been gone weeks ago. To switch metaphors from physics to medicine, the political body rallies to protect itself against infection. The continuing drip-drip-drip of stories about Pruitt's ethical missteps should have caused President Trump to reject him and congressional Republicans to demand his ouster.

To recap the allegations, although not in full: the ludicrously low $50-a-night "rent" at a townhouse owned by a lobbyist's wife; the first-class travel, on the unconvincing excuse of security concerns; the obliviousness to spending public funds (see, $43,000 soundproof phone booth); the overweening sense of petty entitlement (sirens blaring en route to Le Diplomate).

In short, this is not a man who understands the meaning of public service and the ethical boundaries governing those who occupy public office. He should be gone, and perhaps he will be, eventually.

But the reason he has held on is that in Trump's Washington, and in Republicans' moral universe, ideological usefulness and competence outweigh ethical niceties. At the EPA, Pruitt has been a relentless warrior for deregulation and dismantling every Obama era regulation in sight. He is doing what Trump and Republicans want and, unlike so many members of this administration, doing it reasonably effectively.

So criticism is muted -- it passed for big news when John Kennedy, R-La., said Pruitt should "stop acting like a chucklehead" -- and the pageant of malfeasance moves on to the next set of astonishing events.

In that sense, the Pruitt situation is reminiscent of the prevailing Republican response to news reports that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore preyed on teenagers: the seat was too important to let Moore fail. The difference is that Alabama voters eventually got their say on Moore. Pruitt's fate, by contrast, lies in the hands of those who have already proved themselves morally compromised.

Which takes us outside the capital, to a legislative report on the sordid sexual adventures of Missouri's governor that might as well have been titled "50 Shades of Greitens." To read the report is to understand that this is not your ordinary tawdry story about marital infidelity -- a private matter, in Greitens' telling, that occurred before he took office and is between him and his wife.

...continued