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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.
Washington, DC - Today, Reps. Ro Khanna (CA-17), Barbara Lee (CA-13) and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), introduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, a bill to require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct the first federal study on the health and safety of sex workers.
When Congress passed sweeping legislation aimed at curbing sex trafficking in 2018, one group was largely excluded from the debate: sex workers themselves.
Kate D'Adamo is witnessing a shift.
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.
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.
Washington, DC – Today, in response to the publication of the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2020 Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued the following statement: