WASHINGTON— A day after the NFL's Washington Football Team announced its new name, the Washington Commanders, six former Washington Redskins employees testified before the House Oversight & Reform Committee about the sexual harassment they endure while employed by the team.
Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D), who was visibly emotional, said that she would “stay on this like glue” and hold the NFL accountable and pressure the league to publish details of their investigation of the alleged cases of sexual harassment.
Rep. Wasserman Schultz told the witnesses that she had two daughters and that their testimony concerned her about her eldest daughter’s future.
“I have a 22-year-old and an 18-year-old daughter, my 22-year-old daughter is embarking on the very career path now that you young women describe at the outset of your careers,” said Rep. Wasserman Schultz. And you put fear in my heart for her and my younger daughter.”
Wasserman Schultz used the testimony to make the case as to why more women need to be elected to public office, saying that “elections have consequences” and that “these kinds of issues” would get addressed more if more women were elected to public office.
But Wasserman Schultz wasn’t done with the NFL and mentioned the Miami Dolphins as being the “catalyst of this conversation”
“The NFL has a sexism and a race problem that it refused to seriously address,” added Wasserman Schultz before asking one of the witnesses if she believed that certain benefits that the Congress gives to NFL teams should be revoked, if protections against issues like sexual harassment are not addressed.
Republican Rep. Bryon Donalds, who like every other member in the committee was disgusted at how the witnesses were treated while members of the then-Washington Redskins, questioned if it was up to the Congress to act on the issue, saying that under the Constitution, Congress was not to interfere with “individual businesses.”
“Is it Congress’s purview to “do something,” asked Rep. Donalds. We have a responsibility here of regulating, specifically the United States economy when it comes to interstate commerce, to regulating our borders, to actually making sure we coin some money that we appropriate for the necessary functions of government.
“But one of the things of The Constitution of these United States precludes us from doing is interfering directly in the affairs of individual businesses, no matter how abhorrent they may be.”
