Democrats have always spoken with forked tongues on assorted #MeToo cases, calling for swift judgment on accused (and innocent) conservatives such as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, while dragging their feet on allegations involving their own. John Conyers, Keith Ellison, Al Franken, Bob Menendez - they all have had their #MeToo issues, as does the Virginia clown show crew, yet somehow Democrats aren't quite treated the way Republicans are.

And it's really obvious in the case of California Rep. Tony Cardenas, who's been credibly accused of drugging and molesting a teenage girl in his care and now is being sued for it in a California court. Here's what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to promise last May after news of the disturbing case broke:

“As Members of Congress, we each have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of the House of Representatives, and any type of alleged misconduct must be investigated by the Ethics Committee,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Congressman Cárdenas said he will fully cooperate with an Ethics investigation.”

She said that Cárdenas has “appropriately asked us to withhold judgment until there is a full investigation of the facts.”

What has she done since that call for a 'prompt' and 'speedy' investigation? Actually, nothing.

No 'ethics' investigation and no yanked committee assignments. The whole thing has been swept under the rug. Compare and contrast to Republicans who've been charged in legal matters, such as Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, who faces campaign finance violation charges for taking a trip to Italy, or Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who lost his committee assignments based on his blundering language about white supremacy. Cardenas is credibly accused of drugging and molesting a little girl.

Here's the must-read report from Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics:

Rep. Tony Cárdenas, a California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC, is being sued in court by a woman who claims he drugged and molested her when she was 16 and a rising golf star. Cardenas was a member of the Los Angeles City Council at the time of the alleged assault.

Even though Harris and Gillibrand have called for Fairfax to resign, their offices did not respond to a RealClearPolitics inquiry about the allegations Cárdenas is facing and whether he should step down from BOLD PAC at least temporarily while the suit wends its way through court.

So where's that ethics investigation, Nance? And what about #MeToo, or is that just for Republicans? What of the Democrats, such as Pete Buttigieg, who are yelling that Republicans tolerate sexist assault in their ranks while this guy is still 'serving'?

Why are Democrat covering for Cardenas, who by objective standards, would be quite a political liability? And why hasn't Cardenas at least been removed from his committee assignments the way lesser accused miscreants have been removed?

Could it be that in California politics, Cardenas is rather powerful? Someone like Pelosi would know that he's a protege of James Acevedo, the San Fernando Valley machine pol dubbed "the godfather of Latino politics," whose background is in the far-left Chicano brown-beret movement of the 1960s.  Acevedo's the one who engineered the blue takeover of California in the 1990s around the same time the floodgates of illegal immigrants into the state broke, and representatives from districts with huge illegal alien populations took all the power in California. The machine's influence spread from East L.A. and the Valley, to Sacramento, and with Cardenas' entry to Congress, extended to Washington.

So you can see he's important. Democrats aren't about to lose a guy like Cardenas, who's seen as critical to the SoCal political machine that does the ballot-harvestings and which has turned the state of California blue. 

So now we have that weird silence from Pelosi, previously calling for a speedy investigation into a no-brainer issue of child molestation ... and delivering nothing.

Why the inaction, Nance? And why the silence from the press? Doesn't #MeToo mean anything?