In the News
A new legislative proposal, crafted amid a brutal housing crisis in the Bay Area and beyond, would help ward off sales and replacements of mobile home parks that are being eyed as redevelopment sites.
"Every day, manufactured housing and mobile home communities are threatened by redevelopment contractors, aggressive investors, and greedy landlords," said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Bay Area Democrat who is a primary author of the bill that was introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Congressional Democrats filed a bill on Tuesday to study the safety of sex workers — an attempt to figure out if Congress's own crackdown on sex trafficking websites has caused dangerous ramifications.
"As lawmakers, we are responsible for examining unintended consequences of all legislation," Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement on Tuesday.
To combat the ills of the internet, federal lawmakers have increasingly focused on a decades-old law that shields tech companies like Facebook and YouTube from liability for content posted by their users.
Last year, lawmakers approved chipping away at the law, voting overwhelmingly to hold tech platforms accountable when people use their sites for sex-trafficking schemes. They have since floated other changes as well, like making Facebook or other platforms liable when opioids are sold on their sites.
On Tuesday, lawmakers put out a new proposal that would require the federal government to study how a pair of laws that targeted online sex trafficking broadly kicked sex workers off the internet last year.
Congress rarely passes major legislation with a bipartisan vote, but last year both parties agreed that sex work should no longer be promoted online. Experts and sex workers themselves warned that punishing sites that host prostitution ads would force the industry into dangerous shadows, but Congress ignored them.
Kate D'Adamo is witnessing a shift.
When Congress passed sweeping legislation aimed at curbing sex trafficking in 2018, one group was largely excluded from the debate: sex workers themselves.
No sex workers or sex worker rights groups testified in hearings on the laws, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), one of the few members in Congress to vote against the legislation, told Vox in a recent interview. "It's just that their perspective was defeated, it's that their perspective wasn't even considered," he said.
After House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement Monday on a massive annual military spending measure, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna condemned the bipartisan compromise as "a bill of astonishing moral cowardice" that will hand the Pentagon $738 billion in 2020 while doing nothing to end U.S. complicity in Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) is drafting legislation that would study the effects of FOSTA, the bipartisan "sex trafficking" bill that bans hosting any web content promoting prostitution. Since its passage in April 2018, a host of anecdotal evidence suggests that the law has had negative outcomes for sex workers, law enforcement, and online speech.
When a group of bills known as SESTA/FOSTA was introduced in early 2018, it garnered widespread bipartisan support. The bills were intended to curb online sex trafficking, a goal that was easy for lawmakers to get behind, and one that few wanted to be seen actively opposing. One of the few dissenting votes was from Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California.