Congress looks as if it's on the verge of making changes to a secretive set of rules that critics say created an environment of minimal consequences for sexual or other workplace misconduct by lawmakers and staffers.
After months of behind-the-scenes negotiations that a number of lawmakers thought dragged on too long, senators unveiled a bill to overhaul those rules that has bipartisan support and is expected to pass the Senate as soon as this week, reports The Washington Post's Paul Kane.
It would require, for the first time, that lawmakers pay sexual harassment settlements out of their own pockets. And it would require Congress to publish the names of lawmakers who settle these claims and their settlement amounts. The bill still needs to pass the House, which passed its version in February.
To a number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, having a vote to change the rules couldn't come quickly enough. Members and staffers have said sexual misconduct is rampant there.
Nine members of Congress have lost their jobs over allegations of sexual impropriety or related workplace misconduct brought to light in the #MeToo era. The wave of sexual harassment stories hit Washington so hard late last year that at one point, three congressmen lost their jobs in a week. Historians said the last time so many lawmakers lost their jobs at once, it was over slavery.
A Post investigation published in December found that taxpayers had paid at least $174,000 over the past five years for lawmakers to settle sexual harassment and other harassment claims.
Critics say the rules on the books now allow lawmakers to essentially get away with sexual harassment. Accusers must go through months of counseling and meditation before they can file lawsuits, it's all arbitrated within the halls of Congress, and lawmakers who settle with their accuser do not bear the financial burden when the cases are settled. Confidential payments come out of a special U.S. treasury fund. (Read: taxpayer dollars.)
Until this year, members of Congress have never had to sit through training to prevent sexual harassment.
Changing those rules has been one of the few bipartisan causes in Congress these days, but it hasn't come without drama — including accusations by senators that other senators were protecting themselves by slowing down a vote on the bill.
The House passed a bill in February, with relatively little contention, to give staffers who say they are victims of harassment more support to accuse their superiors.
But the bill sat in the Senate for months, leading senators to publicly demand to know what was taking so long. All 22 female senators wrote a letter in March to Senate leaders demanding changes. A month later, 32 male senators — 31 Democrats and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — sent their own letter asking what was up with the delay.
A Republican Senate aide said that senators wanted to get this delicate bill right and be able to roll it out with bipartisan support, and such negotiations can take some time.
The system congressional staffers use to report sexual harassment may seem like an insular issue. But as the #MeToo movement has shown us, the public closely watches what Congress does on this front.
One of the first accusers to speak out against then-Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) says she was motivated to come forward when she heard Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) tell her story of being forcibly kissed as an aide in Congress years ago. Franken resigned last fall after half a dozen other women accused him of unwanted touching or groping, including a soldier who said he groped her on a USO tour.
Congress’s maze of reporting regulations is what Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.) said contributed to keeping her chief of staff on the job after he allegedly threatened to kill a former staffer he had dated. Esty announced she would retire at the end of this year and apologized for not acting sooner.
She vowed to devote her last few months to changing the rules that she now says fostered the workplace misconduct in her office.
She may soon get a chance to make good on that. If this bill passes the Senate, it will go back to the House for another, final vote later this month. Only then can Congress say it actually did something about its sexual harassment problem.