Though Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, announced on Thursday he won’t run for re-election in 2018, the congressman is reportedly pushing back on House leadership’s private pressures for him to resign.
Farenthold was recently revealed to have settled a gender discrimination lawsuit for $84,000 in taxpayer money and stands accused of sexual harassment. The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker reported on Thursday that a Republican source confirmed Farenthold “is retiring under pressure from [Speaker Ryan], who spoke twice to congressman on Wed. & told him he should RESIGN. He’s resisting.”
Farenthold denies any wrongdoing.
I broke down the lawsuit brought against Farenthold by a former female staffer last week here. The sexual harassment allegations are specific and appear credible, but the Board of the Office of Congressional Ethics voted in 2015 to dismiss the allegations by a vote of six to zero.
This week, a man who worked for Farenthold in 2015 approached the House Ethics Committee, which has launched a new investigation into the congressman, with his own story of misbehavior on the part of his former boss, claiming Farenthold regularly bullied staff in crude language and made lewd sexual remarks. In response, CNN reports Farenthold admitted to calling staffers “fucktards,” but said the term was “in jest.”
The staffer’s claim that Farenthold told him before getting married, “Better have your fiancée blow you before she walks down the aisle — it will be the last time,” was corroborated by another former Farenthold employee who spoke to CNN. That’s pretty believable from the man who used to own Blow-me.org.
It seems highly likely that Farenthold at the very least engendered a crude, sexualized workplace for his staffers, behaving far beneath the dignity of the office he holds. It’s also true he’s not alone on Capitol Hill in having done so.
But after using so much taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit that brought credible allegations of sexual harassment against him, and facing corroborated accusations of disreputable conduct, Ryan is probably right in pushing for Farenthold’s resignation. The mounting allegations against him paint an increasingly clear and believable picture of his role in creating an unprofessional office environment, one peppered with plainly gross, often sexual quips about staffers delivered straight from Farenthold himself.
The question now is whether the Texas Republican will stick to his guns and serve out his term or give into sustained pressure from congressional leadership and resign effective immediately.
