With the laughably-named Congressional Accountability Act revealed in recent weeks to be nothing short of a scheme designed to keep victims silent and protect the bad behavior of already-powerful people, the public is rightfully upset.

Plenty of people have ideas for how to fix this broken system. But legislators from Pennsylvania are offering their own solutions, and they should be listened to.

Congressman Tom Marino, R-10th, introduced a bill last week that would prohibit the use of taxpayer money for settlements of sexual harassment claims.

If that seems like a solution looking for a problem, it’s sadly not.

According to the Office of Compliance, over the last 20 years the federal government has used more than $17 million in taxpayer money to resolve claims of sexual harassment, discrimination and other workplace violations.

There’s no way to tell how much of the money was used specifically for sexual harassment settlements. But that’s not the point.

Even one dollar of public money is too much, if that money is being used to resolve allegations of bad behavior by elected officials or anyone else on the public dime.

Marino’s bill would reform this unacceptable state-of-affairs, and would also require the House Ethics Committee to consider the expulsion of any member of Congress who commits sexual harassment.

Marino’s bill has picked up a co-sponsor in Rep. Mike Kelly, R-3rd, who said last week that he’s been shocked by the harassment allegations rocketing around Washington, D.C. Kelly said that he doesn’t see the issue as a political football.

“if it’s right, it’s right and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong,” he said.

That’s the right frame of mind for dealing with this problem, which knows no political party, generation or social class. This isn’t a Democratic problem or a Republican problem — it’s a power problem.

That is to say, the people who made the rules created a system that benefits the powerful at the expense of everyone else.

The bottom line is that Marino is right when he says that “members of Congress should not be held to a different standard.”

That means they don’t get to put victims through a process designed to make the prospect of reporting harassment as unappetizing as possible; they don’t get to enjoy mandatory confidentiality when it comes to financial settlements with victims; and they don’t get to use someone else’s money to pay for confidential settlements with their victims.

The notion that this system is hopelessly broken and needs to be reformed immediately shouldn’t be too controversial to prevent Congress from acting quickly and decisively.

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