New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

Alex Andrews

45 minutes ago

7 min read

What can (and can't) sex workers expect from a Democratic Congress?

So. Tuesday happened.

If you went to bed early, here's the short version: voters took everything a midterm usually takes from a sitting president, and then some. Democrats won the House. Democrats won the Senate. CBS News figures House Democrats will end up with somewhere around 256 seats after flipping more than 40 districts, a few of them in places nobody thought were in play. In the Senate, they've got at least 54, and Alaska and Mississippi still hadn't been called when I sat down to write this.

It wasn't close. Trump's approval was sitting at 38% in the exit polls, and almost nine out of ten voters said the cost of living drove their vote. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman governor anywhere in the country. New Hampshire sent Chris Pappas to the Senate, the first openly gay man ever elected to it. Los Angeles picked a democratic socialist for mayor. If you're celebrating, I get it. Some of what's coming is real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But I've been doing this a long time, and so have a lot of you.

We've watched majorities come and go. So before anybody starts writing thank-you cards, I want to walk through what this "new" crowd has already done to us, because a lot of it they did together, across the aisle, smiling for the cameras.

Let's start with what actually changed, because it's less than it feels like.

The White House didn't change. The old boss is literally still in the building. What changed is who holds the gavels. Hakeem Jeffries is in line to be Speaker, and House Democrats have promised a first-100-days agenda built around what they ran on: bring back the Affordable Care Act tax credits, undo the Republican Medicaid cuts, vote against the Iran war, roll back Trump's tariffs, and launch a pile of investigations into the administration. Jeffries already has working groups on health care, housing, groceries, gas and utilities, and caregiving.

That's a real agenda, and parts of it matter a lot to the people we serve. I'll get to that. But read it one more time and notice who's missing. Nobody ran on us. Nobody ever does.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about sex work policy in Washington: it's the one thing the two parties never seem to fight about. Take FOSTA. (Please! Take FOSTA! ) It passed the House 388 to 25 and the Senate 97 to 2 back in 2018. That's not a Republican law. That's a Congress law. We sued over it, and we're still living with it. Three years after it passed, the Government Accountability Office found federal prosecutors had used FOSTA's new criminal charge exactly once. Once. It didn't put traffickers in prison. What it did was push sex workers back onto the street, offline, without the screening tools that kept us alive, and alone.

And Congress didn't get there on its own.

It had a ride. When FOSTA hit the Senate in March 2018, a coalition letter told senators to pass it as-is, no amendments. Look at who signed. World Without Exploitation. The National Council of Jewish Women. Women's rights groups, sitting in the same car as Enough Is Enough and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the outfit that used to call itself Morality in Media. Equality Now was out there cheerleading for FOSTA too. And according to openDemocracy, two of the loudest groups pushing the bill, NCOSE and Exodus Cry, have ties to anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ causes.

Sit with that for a minute. The same movement that wants to decide what women do with our uteruses got to decide what we do with the rest of our bodies, and a bunch of feminists held the car door open for them. They called it a win for women. I call it carpooling with people who would happily leave you on the side of the road, and some of us got left there. When the votes were counted, the entire Senate resistance consisted of two men: Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky. That was it.

Then there's the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025 with support from both sides.

As of May 19 this year, platforms have to pull reported intimate images within 48 hours or risk FTC fines of up to $53,088 per violation. Let me be clear: nonconsensual imagery is a real harm, and nobody knows that better than sex workers, whose paid content gets stolen and reposted all the time. But look at how the law is built. It protects platforms that take down content in good faith, even if that content ultimately does not qualify. There's no equal pressure in the other direction when somebody files a bad-faith request. So when a takedown notice lands on a sex worker's consensual, legal, paid work, which way do you think the platform's lawyers are going to lean?

The Kids Online Safety Act is the same story.

A Democrat, Richard Blumenthal, wrote it with Republican Marsha Blackburn. It passed the Senate 91 to 3 last Congress, and the Senate Commerce Committee moved it forward again this August. A Democratic Senate isn't going to slow that down. If anything, it might speed it up.

And then there's the big one: the Sunset Section 230 Act. Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin introduced it, and it would repeal Section 230 two years after it becomes law. The cosponsors read like a bipartisan dinner party: Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal and Peter Welch, seated right next to Chuck Grassley, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn and Ashley Moody. If you don't follow this stuff, Section 230 is basically the reason any website lets us exist at all. FOSTA cut one hole in it, and we watched Craigslist personals disappear overnight, and site after site scrub us off the map. A sunset isn't another hole. It's the whole wall coming down. So go ahead and count the Democrats on those bills, and then count how many of them just got more powerful.

If you really want to know what Democrats do with power, though, don't read their federal platform. Look at the states where they already run everything. In Colorado, where Democrats have controlled the legislature for more than a decade, Democratic lawmakers introduced SB26-097 this year to decriminalize consensual adult sex work. It would have been the first full decriminalization law in the country. It got shelved at its very first committee hearing. In Illinois, a Democratic senator introduced the Keeping Sex Workers Safe Act in February; it got sent to the Assignments committee, and that's where it stayed. Rhode Island's decriminalization bill, H 8057, was held for further study. New York's Cecilia's Act is still sitting in committee.

These are trifectas. Supermajorities. Safe seats. And the bills still die in committee. Not because the votes are impossible to find, but because nobody in leadership wants to be caught looking for them. That's the playbook, and I'd expect to see it run nationally.

Now, here's the part the "sex work is a niche issue" crowd never seems to get.

Sex workers aren't single-issue voters, because we don't live single-issue lives. We're tenants. We're uninsured. We're parents and caregivers. We're immigrants and trans folks and people who use drugs and people coming home from prison with records that follow us to every lease and every job application. In other words, we're exactly the people this affordability agenda says it's for.

So yes, some of what's coming could genuinely help.

Reversing the Medicaid cuts might be the single most important thing this Congress does for our community, because for people coming home from jail and prison, Medicaid is the bridge to medication, treatment, and mental health care. The ACA tax credits matter too. Sex workers are self-employed workers, whatever the law pretends, and those credits can be the difference between buying coverage and going without. If the housing, grocery, utility, and caregiving working groups produce actual money instead of press releases, that money reaches us. And voters blamed the tariffs and the Iran war for what they're paying at the pump and the register. So do we.

But some of this should keep you up at night.

Remember January 2025, when the brand-new Republican majority's first bill was the Laken Riley Act? Thirty-three Senate Democrats voted to move it forward. Our migrant community members haven't forgotten that, and neither should you. Keep an eye on the first spending bills, too. In our experience, "anti-trafficking" money pays for stings, not services, and a Democratic majority that's eager to look tough is just as likely to write that check. And don't mistake investigations for progress. Going after Trump is going to suck up all the air in the room, and hearings are not housing.

So where does that leave us?

I think the affordability stuff moves first, because that's what won. I think "protect the kids online" moves fast, because it's the one thing both parties can pass and then pose with. And I think sex workers end up as the price of that bipartisanship. Again. Probably without anyone saying our names out loud while it happens.

Which means we've got work to do.

Every Democrat who signed onto the Section 230 sunset is now in the majority, and the cosponsor list is public, so call them and tell them to hold the line. Push to fix TAKE IT DOWN, too: there need to be real consequences for bad-faith takedown requests and a real way for adult creators to appeal when their lawful work gets pulled. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have spent years introducing bills to study what FOSTA has done to sex workers. Well, now Democrats hold the committee gavels, so there's no excuse left. Hold the hearing. When the Medicaid fight heats up, make sure harm reduction and reentry are part of it, because restoring the cuts is the floor, not the ceiling. And go to your state house. Colorado, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York: the bills already exist. Make the Democrats who run those chambers vote on them, on the record.