THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Convicted tax cheat and Republican Congressman (synonyms?) Michael Grimm has announced that he will resign from Congress. In what has to be one of the grandest understatements of recent time, he declared

I do not believe that I can continue to be 100 percent effective in the next Congress

. I imagine the difficulty of counting votes from a jail cell may have influenced his decision.

The decision, reported by The Daily News earlier Monday night, is an about-face for Mr. Grimm, a former F.B.I. agent. Minutes after pleading guilty last week for underreporting his employees’ wages during a previous iteration as owner of the Manhattan restaurant Healthalicious, and admitting culpability, as part of his plea deal, to all the charges in a 20-count indictment that haunted him throughout his re-election campaign, Mr. Grimm told clamoring reporters he would “absolutely not” resign.

But Mr. Grimm’s mind apparently changed after speaking with Mr. Boehner. House rules dictate that a member convicted of a crime for which a prison sentence of two years or more may be imposed should not participate in committee meetings or vote on the floor until winning re-election. The stricture could have left Mr. Grimm’s 11th district effectively disenfranchised until 2016.

Mr. Grimm, 44, is expected to seek probation for tax evasion, despite sentencing guidelines that recommend as much as three years in prison. Judge Pamela K. Chen of United States District Court in Brooklyn made it clear in court that she would not be bound by the guidelines during Mr. Grimm’s sentencing, set for June 8. And federal prosecutors did not renounce other potential investigations into Mr. Grimm’s alleged campaign finance violations as part of his plea. But they will no longer be his political party’s problems.

The great strength of the Republicans has been their ability to manufacture one 'crisis' after another to never let the voters catch their breath. It appears that the manufacturing process is beginning to churn out some defective products. No sooner has the Orange Boehner fixed this problem caused by a Republican than he is facing another problem caused by a Republican, this one perhaps more contentious because Conservatives see no problem with Scalise.

(Mr. Boehner, who has sought to clean up his party’s reputation as Republicans prepare to take over both chambers, had a new headache to consider when the House majority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, acknowledged on Monday that he had addressed a gathering of white supremacist leaders in 2002.)

Happy New Year, Orange Man!