On the menu today: I’m not going to tell you that the sexual misbehavior of a bunch of long-forgotten members of the U.S. House of Representatives is necessarily the biggest news of the day. Our “cease-fire” with Iran still involves them shooting at us and vice versa, gas prices continue to rise, and it’s primary day in Indiana and Ohio.
Still, your tax dollars were used to pay settlements with the victims of sexual harassment, and the fact that we now have names and specific amounts is big news. And the person we must thank for this new information is . . . controversial GOP representative and South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nancy Mace. Read on.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Sexual Harassment Rogues’ Gallery
Way back in 2017, during the height of the Me Too controversy, female members of Congress made fresh allegations of sexual harassment against unnamed members who were, at that time, still in office. A few days later, the U.S. Congress Office of Compliance released a limited amount of information revealing that it had paid victims more than $17 million in 268 settlements since its creation in the 1990s. That sum included all settlements — not just those related to sexual harassment, but also discrimination and other cases. The money was not paid out of an individual lawmaker’s office but rather out of a special fund set up to handle this within the U.S. Treasury.
For a long while, those who paid attention to this arrangement found it outrageous — Representative Gropey McWanderinghands gets inappropriate with his female staffers, the staffers file complaints, and your money gets used to make the whole scandal go away quietly.
Some might argue this system was an improvement over the situation before 1995, where there was simply no established system to deal with allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate or illegal behavior in congressional offices.
(A line from Straight Arrow News: “Before 1995, U.S. lawmakers were exempt from about a dozen major workplace laws, such as the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.” Say, what happened in late 1994 that would have changed that?)
The GOP wave of 1995 brought in House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a GOP promise to make Congress live under the same laws that applied to everyone else. Only one lawmaker voted against the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995: Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. Man, that’s got to be the worst thing that Senator Byrd ever di— okay, that’s got to be among the worst things that Byrd ever did. Remember, President Obama called Byrd “a voice of principle and reason.”)
We already knew about at least three of the sexual harassment settlements. In late 2017, Politico and the Washington Post found that Lauren Greene, the former communications director for Texas GOP Representative Blake Farenthold, “sued her boss in December 2014 over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and creating a hostile work environment.”
(The rather rotund Farenthold had already been photographed in duck pajamas with a woman in skimpy lingerie at a ClearChannel Radio Christmas party in 2009, a year before he was elected to Congress.) The revelation of using taxpayer funds to settle the lawsuit eventually led to Farenthold’s resignation. After Farenthold resigned, he blamed the media and claimed he had been unfairly scapegoated.
The second member of Congress revealed to have harassed his staffers and used taxpayer funds to settle a lawsuit was longtime Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers; a former staffer claimed in 2017 that Conyers had once slid his hand up her skirt . . . in church.
BuzzFeed broke the news about the settlement:
Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”
Documents from the complaint obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits, three of which are notarized, from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sex acts, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public. Four people involved with the case verified the documents are authentic.
Conyers confirmed he made the settlement in a statement Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was published, but said that he “vehemently denied” the claims of sexual harassment at the time and continues to do so.
But hey, why wouldn’t Conyers settle with this woman for $27,000? It’s not his money, it’s your money. There’s one other revealing detail about Conyers’s scandals that’s worth remembering; from the Morning Jolt, way back in 2017:
Apparently, John Conyers’ behavior had been an open secret for years; as Cokie Roberts said on This Week a few weeks ago, “every female in the press corps knew, don’t get in elevator with him.” We’re left wondering how this could be such an open secret, and why Conyers’ creepy, predatory behavior was never reflected in the coverage of him.
Does that remind you of the media’s treatment of another, more recent creep and harasser, former California representative and gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell? (More on him in a moment.)
The third former member of Congress whose settlement we knew about was Pennsylvania Republican Patrick Meehan, who resigned in 2018 but vowed to repay taxpayers for the money used to settle a sexual harassment claim:
“I will pay $39,000.00 to the U.S. Treasury to reimburse for the severance payment that was made from my office account,” Meehan said in a statement. “That payment will be made within 30 days of my resignation from the House of Representatives. I did not want to leave with any question of violating the trust of taxpayers.”
Fast-forward to this year.
You may recall the horrific scandal involving Texas Republican former Representative Tony Gonzales, who resigned his seat April 13, in the face of a looming expulsion vote. After the details of Gonzales’s former staffer killing herself by setting herself on fire emerged, GOP Representative Nancy Mace set out to force a House vote on a resolution to release sexual misconduct and harassment reports involving members of Congress. Mace’s proposed resolution required the House Ethics Committee to release all sexual misconduct or harassment reports involving members or their staffers.
It is nice to know that in an era of seemingly relentless partisan warfare, where just about any issue can turn into a fierce and intractable divide, every now and then, Democrats and Republicans can put aside their differences and come to a bipartisan agreement on what matters most.
In this case, a solid majority of both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the public should not know about all the sexual misconduct or harassment reports involving members or their staffers. (What, you thought this story was going to have a happy ending?) On March 4, 175 House Republicans and 182 House Democrats voted to refer Mace’s bill to the House Ethics Committee, where they knew it would die. The House Ethics Committee argued, with some justification, that if you make all their work public, some victims and witnesses may become reluctant to come forward:
We believe the forced disclosures mandated by House Resolution 1072 could chill victim cooperation and witness participation in ongoing and future investigations. Victims may be retraumatized by public disclosures of interim work product, excerpts of interview transcripts, and certain exhibits. And witnesses, who often only speak to the Committee confidentially or on condition of future anonymity, could fear retaliation if their cooperation is made public.
Mace tried another route; she and the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the specific sexual harassment cases that had resulted in settlements to former staffers using taxpayer funds. Yesterday, Mace unveiled the list:
2007: Rodney Alexander ($15,000)
2009: Office of Carolyn McCarthy (2 cases resulting in 1 settlement) ($8,000)
2010: Eric Massa I ($85,000)
2010: Eric Massa II ($20,000)
2010: Eric Massa III ($10,000)
2010: John Conyers I ($50,000)
2014: Blake Farenthold ($84,000)
2014: John Conyers (Severance pay $27,111.75)
2017: Patrick Meehan (2 cases resulting in 1 settlement) (Severance pay $39,250)
Mace noted, “All records prior to 2004 were destroyed.”
Rodney Alexander represented Louisiana in Congress from 2003 to 2013, switching parties from a Democrat to a Republican in 2004.
Because the report refers to the “Office of Carolyn McCarthy,” it seems McCarthy herself was not the alleged perpetrator. The former representative died last June.
I’ll bet a bunch of you are reading the name “Eric Massa” and recalling, ah, yes, the “Tickle-Me Congressman.” The New York Democrat Massa resigned from Congress in 2010 and insisted that what his staffers had called sexual harassment was just innocent “tickle fights.”
The good news is that since 2018, if a member of Congress settles a lawsuit involving his or her personal conduct, the lawmaker must reimburse the Treasury for any payouts. But there are some catches: “Reimbursement has conditions and taxpayer funds are still taken out first. Resignations also stop investigations, so if a lawmaker is in the middle of an inquiry and resigns, he or she doesn’t have to pay back the money.”
No doubt, Mace took on this crusade for both personal and political reasons; she’s running for governor of South Carolina.
I don’t have a vote in the Palmetto State’s gubernatorial primary; I live in Virginia, and I don’t have Democrat Mallory McMorrow’s attitude toward just voting wherever you feel like it.
But if I had a vote in that primary, I would vote for current state attorney general Alan Wilson. From what I follow down there, Wilson is the platonic ideal of what a state attorney general ought to be.
But sometimes the candidate who isn’t your favorite can do something worth some appreciation. We may not be able to change what happened with the taxpayer-funded payouts to congressional staffers, but we can at least let the world know what happened and let this abuse of power stick to the perpetrators’ reputations forever. So, Nancy Mace, this Bud’s for you.
Oh, and as for Swalwell . . . somehow his behavior is even worse than we thought:
Another young congressional staffer said Swalwell sent her “flirty” messages on Snapchat starting in 2021, after she had left Capitol Hill.
The two had sex in hotels over the years and he subsequently sent her “nude photos of himself and videos of him masturbating” that the woman later showed to CNN.
“His stories would be his, like, congressional content, but then he would be sending me dick pics,” she recalled. . . .
Swalwell racked up $500,000 in charges at hotels during his time in Congress, according to campaign records.
He frequently used campaign funds to pay for jaunts to Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles — including the hotel where he was accused of sexual assault by model Lonna Drewes — he also racked up a $6,000 bill on booze delivery alone.
The former Democratic rising star was even known to hold work meetings at a local Hooters in Dublin, California when he first ran for Congress in 2012 — which allegedly creeped out colleagues.
“I hope he stops meeting at Hooters,” Cheri Greven, his former political director thought at the time, according to CNN.
There’s no shortage of bad behavior in America’s private sector, but . . . when’s the last time you heard about a private company holding work meetings at the local Hooters? Not even Hooters holds its work meetings at Hooters!
When you’re an elected official, the only people who can tell you no are your constituents and the cops. Your constituents usually vote only on you keeping your job every two years or so, and sometimes gerrymandering or partisan habits make you a de facto officeholder for life. And the cops need evidence of a crime; holding your office staff meeting at a Hooters is extremely bad judgment but not criminal.
Colorado GOP Representative Lauren Boebert — that icon of propriety, modesty, and restraint — recently asked in the aftermath of Swalwell and Gonzales’s resignations, “Why is everybody so horny here?”
Political power does not always attract the very best among us. Many people have repeated versions of the joke, “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.” There are a lot of people — and let’s face it, a lot of men — who wish they could be as sexually active as Hugh Hefner.
What are the two most famous statements about power? Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and Henry Kissinger’s “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Lots of men who don’t have the handsome face, the big muscles, the washboard abs, or other ways of attracting young women will pursue positions of power to appear more attractive in the eyes of women. As we see, there’s no shortage of members of Congress whose expressions of desire cross the line into harassment.
But at least you’re not paying for their settlements anymore. Progress, of a sort.
ADDENDUM: Guess what happened one year ago this week? A shooting war between hostile nuclear-armed rivals. The good news is that the cease-fire between India and Pakistan has held. The bad news is that in the past year, the Trump administration has irked the Indian government on everything from tariffs to bragging about the cease-fire to buddying up with Pakistan. Sooner or later, there’s going to be another crisis . . . and you have to wonder that if the Trump administration calls, attempting to prevent the next fight from going nuclear, how much Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to want to listen.