New Congress will have to follow some new standards

Its official name is the CoN- gressional Accountability Act, but the subtitle could be the “Blake Farenthold legacy” bill. Whatever you call it, the long-sought compromise reached by the House and Senate last week begins to address the appalling problem of sexual harassment in and around the halls of Congress.

It’s not as if both men and women in the House and Senate didn’t know that sexual harassment was going on. And that public money was used to settle complaints. But while they were in the know, members of Congress worked hard to keep the public in the dark.

Two things happened to change the climate. One was the Me Too movement, which encouraged victims of sexual harassment to step forward – in entertainment, in business and in politics. Another was Texas Congressmen Farenthold, who was not only blatant in his harassment of a much younger female staff member, but he was shameless in refusing to take responsibility for his indecent behavior.

It’s worth focusing on Farenthold because the case illustrates how the law and congressional rules worked against the accuser and benefited the accused. It was almost exactly a year ago that the House Ethics committee launched an investigation into the Texas Republican. A week earlier, Politico reported that Farenthold used money from his office account – taxpayer money – to settle an $84,000 sexual harassment lawsuit filed by his former communications director Lauren Greene in 2014.

Greene alleged that Farenthold “regularly drank to excess” and told her that he and his wife hadn’t had sex for years. An aide told her Farenthold talked about “sexual fantasies” involving her.

Farenthold denied all allegations. He said he wouldn’t run again, but neither would he resign, and he promised to repay the $84,000. In April he resigned, stiffing the taxpayers for the 84 grand, and moved back to Texas where he used his political connections to land another job.

One of nine

Farenthold may be the most egregious example, but he is one of nine members of Congress – five Republicans and four Democrats – who either resigned or announced they wouldn’t be running again in the last year. All were men except Elizabeth Esty, a Connecticut Democrat, who said she wouldn’t run again after the Washington Post reported that she kept her chief of staff employed for months after learning he had harassed a female staffer and threatened to kill her.

Those and other stories illustrate why it was necessary for Congress to drag its sexual harassment policies and practices into the 21st century. The mystery is why it took more than a year for both houses to reach agreement – and why that agreement involved watering down more stringent proposals.

The Washington Post reported that 235 harassment complainants were paid $15.2 million between 1997 and 2014. The congressional Office of Compliance used a figure of $17 million. Those are your tax dollars at work – not for you, but for Congress. In almost all of those cases, the public knew nothing about those payouts.

But the secret monetary settlements were only part of the problem. Even more troublesome was how the entire system was stacked against the complainant, which added insult to injury.

While the new law is imperfect, and the House and the Senate will use different standards for handling complaints and requiring members to repay settlements from their own pockets, on the whole the law represents a giant step forward.

In addition to holding lawmakers, including those who leave office, financially liable for settlements resulting from harassment and retaliation, the law eliminates mandatory counseling for the complainant and mediation before a case is pursued.

The law requires public reporting of settlements, including the identification of lawmakers who are personally liable. Federal funds will be disbursed to victims in a timely manner, but lawmakers who don’t reimburse the government could have their wages or possibly their Social Security payments garnished.

No one should think that these changes are going to eliminate sexual harassment. But it removes any doubt that abusers can expect to be able to act with impunity. And that’s a good starting point for the incoming Congress.