Government Integrity and the ME TOO Act
At Business for America, we want to promote greater accountability, transparency, and integrity in how our government operates. Our elected leaders must embrace and reflect not only high legal standards but also an unwavering commitment to ethics and civilized behavior in their public and private lives. Their actions should be ones of which all Americans — especially our youngest citizens — can be proud. The public officials who help enact our laws should also be expected to uphold and obey these laws. Double standards are inherently un-American.
The growing number of allegations of sexual harassment involving current and former members of Congress — plus news reports of some $17 million paid out by Congress since 1997 to settle some of these allegations — are an affront to the American people.
We support immediate disclosure of all such sexual harassment incidents in the halls of Congress — and in the other two branches of the federal government, should the circumstances warrant such disclosure. Where it is important to protect the victims’ identities and privacy, such protections should be afforded. But for those alleged harassers who have settled claims with American taxpayers’ dollars, the American public has a right to know what has transpired.
We also strongly encourage a careful, thorough, and prompt legal review as to whether the nondisclosure agreements signed by members of Congress and their victims can be nullified. A longstanding principle of American contract law is that contracts that contravene sound public policy can be deemed to be void “ab initio” — unlawful at the outset. In our view, such nondisclosure agreements in this context are against good public policy and should be nullified immediately.
We also support legislation to change the current Congressional procedures that have had the effect of discouraging harassment victims from reporting incidents. Earlier this week, the Senate passed legislation requiring that everyone from interns to members undergo sexual harassment training. Then House and Senate lawmakers introduced the Member and Employee Training and Oversight On (ME TOO) Congress Act, overhauling the system for harassment claims, which has already garnered bipartisan support. It’s heartening that even in this era of partisanship, our lawmakers are crossing the aisle to support fundamental human dignity.
