Retiring: Congresswoman Jackie Speier Named One of “Politico's 50” Most Influential People in American Politics for Bringing the Me Too Movement to Congress

She proudly represents California’s 14th Congressional District, stretching from the southern portion of San Francisco through San Mateo County to East Palo Alto. Speier serves on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), where she is the Chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee, and on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where also she serves as Chair of the Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research (STAR) Subcommittee and serves on the Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation (C3) Subcommittee. Additionally, she serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where she serves on the Subcommittees on National Security and Economic and Consumer Policy. Speier is also Co-Chair of the Democratic Women's Caucus (DWC), the Congressional Armenian Caucus, the Bipartisan Task Force To End Sexual Violence, and the Gunviolence Prevention Task Force.
Fighting for Women’s Rights
In October 2017, Congresswoman Speier brought the Me Too movement to Congress by sharing her own experience of misconduct when she was a Congressional aide. Her legislation, the ME TOO Congress Act, became the basis of the bipartisan Congressional Accountability Act (CAA) Reform Act that was signed into law in December 2018. When Speier first started working on Congressional sexual harassment in 2014, she was told by a fellow colleague that even anti-harassment training would never see the light of day. Today, thanks to the CAA Reform Act and a related resolution, anti-harassment training is mandatory; survivors are no longer forced to undergo mandatory counselling, mediation, and cooling-off periods; and workers can’t be silenced with forced non-disclosure agreements. Moreover, interns and fellows have the same protections as permanent staff; employees can be heard in anonymous and regular climate surveys; and Members must personally cover the costs for their harassing behavior, not taxpayers. As a result of these efforts, employees also now have legal representation and counseling through the Office of Employee Advocacy, so that the U.S. House of Representatives is no longer exclusively providing counsel to Member offices accused of misconduct.
The CAA Reform Act went into effect in June 2019 and has already made tremendous progress in people’s lives. However, Congresswoman Speier’s work is not finished. She will be introducing additional legislation with her colleague Congressman Bradley Byrne to further bolster protections for staff and hold Members accountable for their discriminatory behavior.
She also continues to advocate for fundamental reforms to end the epidemic of sexual assault in the military and on college campuses, and she is leading the fight against sexism in the fields of science and technology and academia overall. And she is at the forefront of efforts to increase constitutional protections against sex discrimination through ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and to end gender-based discrimination in the pricing of goods and services through the passage of the Pink Tax Repeal Act.
During her 18 years in both chambers of the California Legislature, Congresswoman Speier had more than 300 bills signed into law by both Republican and Democratic governors. Speier secured justice for women and children with a series of bills that led to the collection of more than $2 billion in delinquent court-ordered child support payments. She authored a measure that gave the state the nation’s strongest financial privacy law and was integral to the passage of California’s Gender Tax Repeal Act in 1996.
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