How Much Can Democrats Get Away With? You May Not Want to Know.

On Thursday, I wrote about how Democrats only believe in the presumption of innocence when it’s one of their own who stands accused of something. However, if a Republican is accused of something, they are presumed guilty.

That hypocrisy and double standard barely scratch the surface.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey (D-Mass.) is up for reelection in November, and her personal life has drawn a sliver of the media scrutiny any straight male Republican would face.

For about 12 years, she was in a relationship with Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Gabrielle Wolohojian. The two split in 2019, while Healey was attorney general. A few years later, Healey nominated her ex to the Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest bench.

Even The Boston Globe editorial board was uncomfortable with it.

"Surely a smart politician like Governor Maura Healey knows that optics count," the board wrote. "And surely she also had to know that the optics around nominating her former longtime partner to the state's highest court are just dreadful."

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Then there's Healey’s current partner, Joanna Lydgate. Healey began dating Lydgate, a subordinate from the attorney general's office, while Lydgate was still married to a man. The couple claims the romance began a few months after Lydgate left the AG's office, while she was still married. "Working together in the office, we were always really close," Healey told the Globe. "After we stopped working together, we realized this is something more … than just being best friends, and it has been a really beautiful, unexpected journey."

Buy that? I don’t. Think the media cared?

But it still gets worse. Healey also nominated Gillian Feiner, a lawyer who works for Lydgate, to a Superior Court judgeship. A spokesperson insisted that Feiner is "a highly qualified candidate for the Superior Court" and that Lydgate "was not involved in the nominating or selection process."

Do you think a straight male Republican could get away with so many ethically dubious actions like that? Give me a break. The only real question here is whether this is a political double standard, a gender double standard, or a sexual orientation double standard.

I'm gonna go with all three, and I’ll tell you why.

The pattern has deep roots. Let me give some highlights — or lowlights.

In 1983, the House censured two members for sexual relationships with underage pages. Rep. Dan Crane (R-Ill.) lost his next election. Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) won reelection six more times before retiring in 1997. In 1994, Mel Reynolds (D-Ill.) was reelected to Congress despite sexual assault charges involving an underage campaign worker. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), impeached as a judge in 1989, served decades in Congress despite ongoing ethics controversies into the 2010s. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) remained in Congress for years after his 1980 ABSCAM bribery scandal. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) survived a late-1980s prostitution scandal and served in the House until 2013. In 2018, Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) was elected as Minnesota Attorney General despite domestic abuse allegations. In 2019, Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) initially apologized after a photo on his 1984 medical school yearbook page showed one person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan attire. He refused to resign and finished his term.

Imagine any Republican surviving such scandals.

Scandal, it turns out, depends less on what a politician does than on who does it. Check the right boxes, and the press hands you warm profiles and the benefit of the doubt. Check the wrong ones, and your private life becomes public property overnight.