Republicans Are Standing Up to Sexual Misconduct — and Washington Should Pay Attention

F or nearly a decade, the #MeToo movement was framed as a cultural and ideological battle. Supporters spoke the language of feminism, decrying cultural sexism and patriarchy. Critics on the right often dismissed the movement as one prone to excess, identity politics, or media grandstanding, often weaponized against political enemies.

But something unexpected is now happening in Washington. Some of the loudest voices demanding accountability for sexual misconduct in Congress are now Republican women. You can chart this movement to about six months ago, when Marjorie Taylor Greene had a public falling out with President Trump in response to the slow trickle release of the Epstein files, eventually ending in her resignation from Congress in January. Representatives Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Anna Paulina Luna have joined the new voices leading a push for greater transparency around congressional misconduct investigations, following the scandals of their former fellow members of Congress, Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales. And Representative Kat Cammack joined her colleague Teresa Leger Fernández — chairs of the Republican and Democratic Women’s Caucuses, respectively — to launch a bipartisan initiative addressing how sexual misconduct cases are handled in Congress.

That shift matters — not because Republicans suddenly became feminists, but because sexual misconduct is increasingly being understood as something larger than a cultural grievance. It is becoming viewed as an institutional integrity issue, and that changes everything.

The recent scandals involving Swalwell and Gonzales accelerated this realignment. Public outrage was not simply about personal morality. It was about power: powerful men, protected by powerful systems, maneuvering around accountability because bureaucratic institutions prioritized damage control over truth.

That framing resonates deeply with the modern populist right. This sizable element of today’s conservative movement is defined less by traditional social and economic conservatism and more by distrust of elite institutions: Congress, universities, intelligence agencies, corporate media, and federal bureaucracies. Sexual misconduct scandals fit naturally into that worldview because they expose something many Americans already suspect — that institutions often protect themselves first. So what we are seeing now is a political realignment: This issue no longer belongs neatly to one political tribe.

As the first woman to go to Congress on this issue from inside the CIA, I saw this dynamic firsthand. After my own assault at CIA headquarters, it was Republican leaders and staffers at the House Intelligence Committee who were most eager to hear my story and fight for reform. In fact, Republicans were in control of the House when they passed landmark legislation to reform the CIA’s reporting and response procedures related to sexual assault in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, largely due to my testimony and that of the 26 other victims who came forward.

The fact is, sexual misconduct corrodes institutional trust from the inside out. A military unit plagued by sexual misconduct is not mission-ready. An intelligence agency that teaches employees retaliation is inevitable creates cultures of fear and silence. A Congress unwilling to police its own members cannot credibly oversee the ethics of anyone else.

That is why the emerging bipartisan focus on this issue is more significant than many commentators realize. The original #MeToo movement largely centered on gender inequities and workplace sexism. The newer language coming from many conservatives sounds different: corruption, bureaucratic self-protection, abuse of power, institutional decay, elite impunity. It’s the same underbelly of issues, just reframed.

That distinction matters because it broadens the coalition demanding reform. For years, conversations around sexual misconduct were politically siloed. Many conservatives viewed the issue through the lens of partisan culture wars rather than institutional governance. Many progressives treated it primarily as a gender-politics issue. But institutions themselves do not care about ideology when protecting power. The same self-preserving instincts appear in Hollywood, Congress, the military, universities, media, and intelligence agencies alike. That realization is creating unfamiliar new alliances.

It is why conservative women and progressive women increasingly find themselves agreeing that Congress’s internal accountability systems are broken. It is why lawmakers from both parties are now discussing reforms that would have once been politically radioactive: public ethics transparency, stronger reporting mechanisms, and tougher penalties for misconduct.

Americans increasingly understand that sexual misconduct is not simply about sex. It is about power, coercion, intimidation, institutional protection, and whether systems are designed to protect the vulnerable or the connected.

That is not a “women’s issue.” It is a governance issue. It is an integrity issue.

For the last several years, we have been told that the #MeToo movement is dead, and maybe that’s true of the original effort. But perhaps that is where the next phase of this movement will gain its lasting strength. Because while Americans may disagree on ideology, they increasingly agree on something else: Institutions that protect predators eventually stop protecting everyone else.