A double standard for Congressmen

Including Florida’s Rep. Alcee Hastings

Is it too late for Katie Hill to withdraw her resignation and reclaim the California congressional district she took from the Republicans last year?

Probably so. But one could hardly blame her for trying.

It appears there are different standards of ethics for House freshmen like her and for very senior members of Congress like Rep. Alcee Hastings, who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

Hill, 32, was a fast-rising star among Democrats in the House until she was beset with allegations of an affair with a campaign aide and another with an employee on her congressional staff.

She resigned last month, shortly after the House Ethics Committee said it was investigating the matter concerning her employee.

But the committee is silent on allegations that Hastings has a personal relationship with a member of his staff.

The committee chair is Hastings’ Florida colleague, Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton. His office referred an inquiry to the Ethics Committee staff, which never comments until the chair and ranking member decide to announce something, as they did in Hill’s case. But if Hastings is on their radar, they aren’t saying.

That doesn’t look right. Worse, it isn’t right.

Any dalliance with a staffer is flatly prohibited. A rule change adopted in 2018 forbids any sexual relationship between a House member and an employee of the office or of a committee on which the member serves. Hastings voted for it, as did Deutch and the entire House leadership.

Unlike an older rule against the employment of relatives, it did not come with an exception for existing relationships. That difference is significant.

Not long after Hill’s fiery resignation speech, the Palm Beach Post reported that the Ethics Committee is showing no interest in Hastings’ employment of aide Patricia Williams. They bought a $700,000 house together two years ago, and Hastings does not seem to make much effort to deny that the relationship is personal.

“However it looks,” he told the Post, “it’s been looking like that for 25 years.”

However it looks, the rules are different now. There was no rule 25 years ago other than the unwritten one that men in power, whether in Congress or corporate executive suites, could get away with just about anything in matters of sex. But the rules now discourage any situation in which an employer might exploit a subordinate. McDonald’s, for example, fired its CEO this month over a consensual affair with an employee.

A few years back, Hastings himself was accused of sexual harassment by a woman who worked on a commission he led. He denied it, the Ethics Committee found no evidence, and her lawsuit was dismissed. Still, she got a $220,000 settlement from public funds. Hastings said he had not known the House would pay her and disapproved of it.

“I am still beside myself that they paid her a single penny,” Hastings told us last year.

Williams was his attorney when he was impeached and removed as a federal district judge in 1989. Three years later, he was her lawyer when the Florida Supreme Court disbarred her over ethical violations involving, among other things, how she represented clients and handled their money.

Hastings was elected to Congress in 1992, returning in triumph to the House that had impeached him over allegations of conspiring to take a bribe — charges for which a criminal jury had acquitted him. Although the Senate had voted 69-26 to remove him, it did not exercise the option of barring him from future federal service. He is being treated for cancer, but has said he will seek another term next year.

According to the Post, Williams is paid at an annual rate of $168,412. No other staffer in the Palm Beach County congressional delegation is paid more, the paper reports, including chiefs of staff, who are typically the paid the most.

Hastings said Williams advises him on immigration issues and has “worked with me from Day One … It would be one thing if she didn’t work, but she’s working today, and she has continued to work.”

Trouble is, it doesn’t matter under the House rule how hard or well an employee works, or even that a relationship may have been voluntary throughout. The rule has to be absolute to serve the essential purpose of discouraging abusive behavior before it starts.

If committee members believe there should be exceptions for pre-existing relationships, they should take the straightforward step of amending the rule to say so.

To open an investigation into Hastings and Williams would not necessarily mean an abrupt end to his service.

For one thing, the committee would have to be satisfied that a sexual relationship exists. Sharing the ownership of a residence is circumstantial evidence only, though it could be said to reflect poor judgment.

In the event that it found grounds to act, the committee could resolve this double standard with a recommendation of reprimand or censure, and then leave Hastings to the judgment of his constituents.

The investigation of Hill would not necessarily have led to her ouster, either, although Speaker Nancy Pelosi was plainly pleased to see her leave.

We recommended Hastings for re-election last year — over a much junior and inexperienced challenger — in recognition of his seniority, his zeal for reform, his accomplishments for his district and state, and his devotion to Medicare, Social Security and the need for a health care plan worthy of a nation such as ours.

But we cannot overlook, nor should the Congress, the implications of what Hill said in her farewell speech to the House:

“I’m leaving. But we have seen men who had been credibly accused of intentional acts of sexual violence and remain in boardrooms, on the Supreme Court, in this very body, and worst of all, in the Oval Office.”

There is no place for any double standard in our democracy, or even for the appearance of one.

Rep. Deutch, what say you?

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.