[JURIST] US President George W. Bush signed a bill [text; summary] Friday to help monitor US congressional pages [program backgrounder, PDF] by expanding the supervisory House Page Board to include a former page and a current or former page's parent. Reps. Dale Kildee, (D-MI), the new board chairman, and Shelley Moore Capito,(R-WV), co-sponsored the bill in response to the 2006 scandal involving improper e-mail correspondence between former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) [Congressional profile] and a former congressional page from Louisiana. AP has more.

Foley resigned from Congress after the messages became public last September, spurring former House Speaker Dennis Hastert [official website] to call on the DOJ [JURIST report] to launch a formal investigation. In December, the US House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct [official website] concluded that Republican leaders failed to protect young pages [JURIST report] from inappropriate communications and Hastert most likely received at least two emails detailing Foley's abuses, but did not act on the claims for fear of creating scandal.