Michigan State representative Todd Courser, the married tea-party legislator who created the Hydra of controversies after failing to cover up his affair with a colleague by inventing a fake scandal involving a male prostitute — and then claiming he was the victim of a larger conspiracy involving blackmail — resigned at 3 a.m. on Friday. At 4:13 a.m., the Michigan House expelled Representative Cindy Gamrat, the married colleague he had a relationship and shared an office space with. A day earlier, Courser was still determined to fight for his job. After a 14-hour session and two failed attempts to expel him — a supermajority was necessary, and many Democrats wanted to wait to expel him, hoping that a criminal investigation was possible — he resigned, saying, “I just felt like the hour is late and … it was the appropriate moment to do it.” Gamrat told the Detroit News, “Resigning would have been a whole lot easier, I’ll tell you that. But sometimes the easy roads aren’t the best roads to take.”
“It’s sort of Shakespearean, if you look at it,” Courser said on Thursday.
This has been today’s “laboratories of democracy” accident report.
