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Laura Friedman (right), chair, Assembly Rules Subcommittee on Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation Prevention and Response, listens with others to speakers during the state Assembly's first public hearings in the Capitol to examine complaints that the Legislature has fostered a culture of pervasive sexual harassment and abuse on Tuesday, November 28, 2017 in Sacramento, Calif.
Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

With a new report showing that the Legislature has paid nearly $2 million worth of taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment claims over the past 25 years, there’s truly no excuse for Sacramento not to adopt basic protections for everyone who works under the Capitol dome.

The research released this week by Tuple Legal, a nonprofit law and political research firm, details the past 25 years’ worth of only known, formal settlements. But that is damning enough.

Taxpayer money shouldn’t be spent to cover up the improper behavior of public representatives.

To add insult to injury, Tuple Legal’s research found that many of the settlements contained a “no-reemployment” clause, preventing victims from seeking employment with the state Senate or Assembly in the future. While their harassers continued to enjoy the privileges of public representation, the victims were forced to find new lines of work.

“Our Legislature is doing what it can to actively hide harassers,” wrote Tuple Legal political researcher Ryan Hughes.

One obvious answer for this problem would be for Sacramento to adopt basic best practices to prevent harassment and protect victims. It needs to create confidential reporting procedures. It needs to extend whistle-blower protections to Capitol staffers, who tend to be at-will employees. These are standard procedures in the world outside of the Capitol, and it’s past time for them to be adopted in Sacramento, too.

A handful of elected officials have been pushing their colleagues to overhaul Sacramento’s retrograde sexual harassment policies. While this group is bipartisan — it includes Southern California Assemblywomen Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, and Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore — it’s still mostly women. Their male colleagues need to understand that sexual harassment is an issue that affects everyone, and agree to changes.

