Zach Wamp, a fellow Republican, lives with John Ensign in a Christian group house on Capitol Hill's C Street. GOP stays neutral on Ensign's future

Rep. Zach Wamp took a $5,000 campaign contribution from Sen. John Ensign — a fellow Republican and fellow resident of a Capitol Hill Christian fellowship house — eight days after Ensign admitted publicly that he’d had an affair with a former staffer.

The contribution, from Ensign’s Battle Born PAC to Wamp’s Tennessee gubernatorial campaign, shows up on Ensign’s latest FEC filing — and there’s no indication that Wamp has tried to return it.


Wamp did not respond to questions about the contribution Monday; his congressional office referred POLITICO to his gubernatorial campaign, and the campaign did not respond to several messages.

Although Wamp and Ensign live together at the C Street Christian group house, Wamp, a Tennessee Republican, has said little about Ensign’s affair except to suggest that he’ll abide by the code of silence that covers whatever happens in the home.

Two weeks after taking the $5,000 from Ensign, Wamp told the Knoxville News Sentinel: “I hate it that John Ensign lives in the house and this happened, because it opens up all of these kinds of questions.” But, he added, “I’m not going to be the guy who goes out and talks.”

It’s a common sentiment among Republican lawmakers — and not just the ones who live at C Street.

Since Ensign admitted his affair last month, the surrounding scandal has taken a series of surprising turns: Ensign’s supporters accused the husband of his former mistress of attempted blackmail; the husband — himself a former Ensign staffer — accused Ensign of using his job as “leverage” to continue the affair; Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and former Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.) admitted knowing about the affair more than a year ago; and Ensign admitted that his parents had given the family of his former mistress nearly $100,000 after she left her job on his campaign staff.

But through it all, one thing has remained constant: Not a single GOP senator has called on Ensign to resign.

“I personally don’t think [resigning] is called for, and I leave that situation up to him,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn, who has said that Ensign could continue to play a role through fundraising and other matters in the 2010 election, including the race to unseat Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. “I get a sense that the public is less judgmental than perhaps they have been in the past.”

But the past isn’t so long ago. When then-Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was convicted on federal criminal charges in 2008, a number of GOP leaders — including Ensign — called for his resignation. Ensign was also on the resignation bandwagon in 2007, when then-Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room sting.

Yet when Sen. David Vitter’s name turned up in the phone book of the alleged “D.C. madam” in 2007, his GOP colleagues refused to push him aside — and he’s running for reelection now.

So where’s the line?

Republican aides note that Stevens and Craig were both convicted of crimes — although Stevens’s conviction was later reversed and Craig tried to argue after the fact that he’d pleaded guilty by mistake.

Charles Moran, a spokesman for the Log Cabin Republicans, said that the “outrage is stronger for homosexual conduct.”

Craig faced resignation calls from his colleagues after allegedly soliciting sex from a man; Ensign and Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seem poised to survive having admitted to affairs with women, and Vitter has survived being linked to a female prostitution ring.

“Do people in the party look at it another way? Absolutely,” Moran said. “It’s a symptom of a larger problem of the Republican Party” that turns away gays and lesbians, he added.

But former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) — who resigned in 2006 after ABC News confronted him with lewd messages he’d sent to male pages — told POLITICO Monday that “every situation is different.”

One big variable: the proximity to the next Election Day. Stevens was convicted just days before the 2008 election, and the Foley scandal dominated the news just weeks before the 2006 midterms.

“Everything was circumstantial,” Foley said Monday. “With the timing, there was a clear concern from the members, [who were] hearing rumors and innuendos.”

A former Stevens aide said Monday that the approaching election made it politically convenient for top Republicans — including those on the party’s presidential ticket — to throw Stevens under the bus.

“I think in Stevens’s case, the calls for his resignation were a product of election-year politics,” the aide said. “If Ensign’s or Vitter’s scandals had become public so close to an election, I think you would have seen a similar backlash among their colleagues.”

With the next election more than a year off, GOP senators may figure they can ride out the Ensign affair. While they’re not exactly embracing their Nevada colleague, they’re not attacking him, either.

Asked whether Ensign can rebound, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, No. 3 in Senate Republican leadership, said: “That’s between John Ensign and his family and the people of Nevada.”

On Monday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the FBI to launch an investigation into whether Ensign made improper severance payments to his former mistress, Cynthia Hampton.

Ensign’s admission that his parents gave Hampton’s family some $96,000 as gifts has raised questions as to whether he tried to buy the family’s silence. Ensign’s lawyer has said that “the gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hampton family and others.”

“All that is a cause of concern, but I’m his friend,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, a conservative Republican running for Kansas governor. “He’s admitted to doing some awful things in his own estimation, and I agree with him confessing that and putting that out in the public. But that doesn’t change that we’re friends.”