Swansenreport

The House doesn’t agree on much these days. On Tuesday, it agreed on this: lawmakers who used taxpayer money to settle sexual misconduct claims should have their names made public.

Four hundred twenty to zero. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who had already subpoenaed similar records herself, voted present rather than joining the majority. Otherwise, it was as close to unanimous as the House gets on anything.

The resolution came from Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. — a member known for forcing votes leadership would rather avoid. It directs the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights to produce a “single consolidated list” naming every member, delegate, or resident commissioner who has been the subject of a sexual harassment investigation, or whose conduct resulted in a taxpayer-funded settlement, along with the total public funds spent. Sixty days. That’s the deadline.

Congress has been down this road before, sort of. A 2018 law already requires members to personally reimburse the government for misconduct settlements and requires an annual report on the payouts. Massie says that law has a hole in it. He discovered there were no reported cases of any member actually repaying a settlement since the law took effect — which, to him, suggested the reporting requirement wasn’t catching everything it was supposed to.

Mace has her own head start on the answer. Her office subpoenaed the OCWR earlier this year and reported that taxpayers paid over $300,000 in settlements on behalf of six former members of Congress or their offices. That’s why she called Tuesday’s vote redundant. She posted afterward that she’d already subpoenaed the records in March and released them in May, calling the resolution “nothing more than political theater.”

Massie sees it differently. Transparency shouldn’t require a subpoena to obtain, he told colleagues on the floor. It should just be public.

The timing isn’t incidental. The vote follows a rough stretch for the House, including the resignations of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, after they faced sexual assault and misconduct allegations, respectively. Whatever names surface in 60 days, they’ll land in a chamber already primed to react.

Wisconsin’s Rep. Tom Tiffany was among the 420. He voted yes, according to the official House record. Whether the rest of the state’s delegation joined him couldn’t be independently confirmed member by member — but with only one Republican voting present and ten members absent chamber-wide, the odds are good the whole Wisconsin bench was on board.

Sources: Roll Call; The Hill; Washington Times; Fox News; Congress.gov official vote record.