In the Matter of Allegations Relating to Representative Chuck Edwards

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I thank the chair, the ranking member, and all of my colleagues, as well, for the hard work and nonpartisan work, I must say, as well, that we put in, but especially the staff, who I thought did an outstanding job, yet again, in this investigation and in the report that they wrote.

I will speak to two different groups of people today. The first is my colleagues. The second is the young women--and I will come back to this in a minute--who I had a chance to speak to a few weeks ago, in the same week that Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales had resigned from the House. I will come back to that in a moment.

My colleagues, after they found out I was on the Ethics Committee, would frequently come up and ask me on different topics: What is over the line? What can I do to not get in trouble? How do I stay out of trouble, that sort of thing.

On these issues, this is a particular set that we have talked about on a couple of occasions, so I wanted to point out a couple of things here.

I commend Mr. Edwards for the comments that he made and the legal document that he filed, but one of the things it really failed to do was address the specific allegations about the gifts and how inappropriate, frankly, they obviously were on their face.

As the report details on page 4 of the report: ``Both women received numerous gifts from Representative Edwards, including jewelry totaling over $1,000, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and cell phone, KitchenAid mixer, robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances, and one-on-one dinners.''

The tickets to performances, that wasn't just any performance. That was ``Hamilton'' on Broadway.

Mr. Speaker, my anniversary is coming up. I have been married 38 years as of Thursday, and my wife really wanted to go to see ``Hamilton.'' When I took a look at what those prices were, I said: Babe, we are going to have to wait until it comes on the off-Broadway tour.

He put up the money to send them there anyway, and those are the types of things, those are the types of gifts, that kind of jump out at you. This isn't like a birthday card. This isn't congratulations on your wedding or that new baby that was born. These are gifts that people, Members, should not be giving to staffers.

I worked for a Congressman and three Senators as a staffer beginning back in 1987. We didn't pass around gifts like this. We just didn't.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for us to make sure we understand that, as Members, we want to mentor and help our young people move on and move up. I have to say that in that 40 years, I have seen people who fell into this situation, frequently women, where there were accusations or sexual harassment taking place or sexual relationships taking place. Some of my personal friends were forced out of their jobs in 1987 and 1988.

We didn't have the types of protections then that we do now. In fact, Congress explicitly exempted itself from these sorts of restrictions. We have to make sure that now that they are in place, we use them to the fullest extent because those people, primarily women, it was damaging to their careers, and it stays with them.

That was before the internet age. These women today, in this instance, that is not good mentoring. This is something that could follow them for the rest of their careers, and it won't be beneficial to them.

Let's make sure, as we work through this with our staff, that we don't do things that actually injure our staffers who are doing good work for us and trying to make a difference.

One other point I want to make, and this is directly to the staffers. I had a chance to speak to a group, just coincidentally, during that week of the Gonzales and Swalwell resignations. It was a group of young people, mainly interns but not solely. Some of them were young people here on the Hill in their late teens and early twenties.

I asked them: How many of you heard about the resignations of Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales? There were about 40 of them in the room. Every hand went up.

I asked them then: How many of you know that we have an entity here, the Office of Employee Advocacy, that you can turn to and get assistance if you find yourself in that situation? Only two hands went up.

I talked to them and encouraged them about reaching out to this sort of professional assistance. It is a confidential attorney-client relationship. It makes a difference. Instead of them trying to parse out at age 19 or 20 or 22 or 25 the best way to proceed, get the sort of legal guidance to help you make it through there.

We have to do a better job of making sure that when that question is posed, not just 2 hands go up, but all 40 hands go up, so that when young men and women, especially women, find themselves in these kinds of situations, they don't have to try and figure out how to go forward. They don't have to go to the staff director, as what happened here, and get whatever guidance they might get, recognizing that the staff directors were in a precarious situation, too, when you have a Member committing this kind of misconduct. Let's make sure that they have that type of assistance.

Mr. Speaker, the last point I will make on this, and this is in the wake of some of the other--not investigations before the committee right now, but some of the other things we have heard. There are going to come times when we need to go outside of the House of Representatives and refer these cases to law enforcement because some of the sexual misconduct isn't just sexual harassment. It is sexual assault.

To the colleagues listening out there right now, don't do anything to approach these lines. They know that this is over the line. He knows this was over the line, and he knew it when he was doing it. Let's make sure that we stop it in its tracks and give these young people, young women in particular, the type of assistance that they need.

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