The House voted on Tuesday to censure Representative Chuck Edwards, Republican of North Carolina, after a bipartisan panel found “substantial reason to believe” that he had violated the chamber’s rules against sexual harassment.
Mr. Edwards, 65, announced last month that he would not seek re-election after the House Ethics Committee issued a report recommending that he be formally reprimanded for “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct toward two young female staffers.”
The censure resolution passed overwhelmingly, 413 to 2. Just one other Republican, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, joined Mr. Edwards to oppose it.
After the vote, Mr. Edwards, who sent his colleagues a 22-page letter last week imploring them not to censure him, stood in the well of the House floor to be officially rebuked.
The ethics investigation into Mr. Edwards came after the resignations of two lawmakers who faced sexual misconduct accusations — Representatives Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, and Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas — focused fresh attention on a culture of silence about and tolerance of inappropriate behavior by male members of Congress toward women on Capitol Hill, and prompted the House to review its handling of such complaints.
The Ethics Committee has faced particular criticism from several lawmakers who believe that it is too slow to investigate claims of misconduct. The panel’s inquiry into Mr. Edwards took fewer than four months.
Representative Michael Guest, Republican of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said on Tuesday that his panel found “no evidence that Mr. Edwards engaged in sexual activity or that he explicitly propositioned any individuals under his employment.” But investigators concluded that Mr. Edwards’s “conduct toward two young female staffers was inappropriate and violated rules prohibiting sexual harassment,” he said.
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The Ethics Committee’s report said that Mr. Edwards made repeated comments about the women’s “appearance and dress,” invited them to “intimate dinners and vacations” wrote them notes expressing his affection and bestowed gifts that included jewelry worth more than $1,000; designer purses; guns; a laptop and a cellphone; a KitchenAid mixer; tickets to performances; and dinners.
The committee also found that Mr. Edwards wrote poems for one of the women, did yardwork for her and paid for her massages at a spa. The panel’s report also cited text messages from one of the women that showed that Mr. Edwards had sent her nearly two dozen containers of ice cream because, he said, he thought she needed “a lot of cheering up!”
Mr. Edwards, a two-term member of Congress from western North Carolina, apologized to his staff members in remarks on the House floor and said that he regretted some of his actions.
“I’m sorry that my actions, my judgment or the way that I expressed a friendship ever put either of you in an uncomfortable position,” he said. “I recognize that my understanding of those relationships may not have always matched yours.”
But Mr. Edwards disputed the Ethics Committee’s conclusion and accused the panel of leaping to conclusions without fully considering the broader context of his long-term working relationships with his staff members.
“Conduct that is otherwise permissible does not automatically become misconduct simply because enough individual moments are assembled together and viewed through the darkest possible lens,” he said.
Mr. Edwards’s remarks largely echoed the 22-page letter he sent to House members last week, which was first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS.
Censures are effectively a public reprimand by the House that is one disciplinary step below expulsion, and they had been relatively rare until recently. But five members have been censured since 2021, and several others have faced censure attempts that failed as such resolutions have become a partisan political weapon.
The post House Censures Republican Accused of Sexually Harassing Two Aides appeared first on New York Times.
