A few days ago, members of Congress vowed to boot Roy Moore out of the Senate for ethical breaches if the Alabama voters dared elect him.

Those are the same members whose Congress, it turns out, shelled out $15 million in sexual harassment claims.

That's a $15-million taxpayer-financed slush fund designed to allow congressmembers to go sex-harassing on their own without penalty.  The payouts come from us.  According to NTK:

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) informed NBC's Chuck Todd on Tuesday that $15 million in taxpayer money had been paid out over the years to settle sexual harassment suits filed against members of Congress.

Earlier in the day, Speier testified in front of the House Administration Committee that two members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat, have engaged in sexual harassment in the past.

Speier confirmed that it is the taxpayers who were on the hook for these miscreants and said she wants changes to be made so that the sex harassers could pay for their own payouts now.  Maybe that will keep her busy instead of just yelling about Trump.

It comes at a mighty curious time – the same time congressional leaders of both parties are intoning piously about expelling Roy Moore if he is elected to the Senate, using a law last invoked against congressional members who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

So they're outraged about Moore's supposed transgressions but have been comfortable all these years (Speier says it was a decade) with multi-million-dollar sex harassment payouts kept under the table?

It raises questions as to what this is really about.  We know that mass hysteria, as described by Victor Davis Hanson and even Masha Gessen, is one part of it.  But it's more than that.  Moore ran as an outsider to the GOP establishment, and even President Trump opposed him.  That seems to be the real problem for them.  The GOP had it in for him for that, and it was enough to trigger this extremist measure to keep him out.  As for the Democrats, mass hysteria over the crumbling of Democrat shibboleths such as Harvey Weinstein seems to be fueling the anti-Moore moves.  As Masha Gessen writes from the left side in the New Yorker:

Earlier this year, I had a chance to hear a prominent Democratic Party activist reëvaluate what had seemed like a pivotal point in the 2016 Presidential campaign: the day in October when an audio recording of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women "by the [p----]" surfaced. The Clinton campaign celebrated a premature victory, because surely Trump had rendered himself unelectable. The activist explained the problem with that assumption: to vote against Trump on the basis of the "Access Hollywood" tape, many women would have had to repudiate their husbands, brothers, uncles, and cousins – their entire lives. In other words, we should not have been surprised that some fifty-three per cent of white women voted for Trump; it had been naïve and foolhardy to expect them to defect. Roy Moore's apparent staying power serves to affirm the hypothesis.

They haven't got the memo yet that they are in the middle of a progressive frenzy.  Nor has the GOP establishment gotten the memo on Trump.

All we can see now is the hypocrisy of $15 million in taxpayer-financed payments caused by a Congress that would have you think they're your betters.