The House Appropriations Committee unanimously added language to a key annual report today that directs the judiciary to accelerate its work to ensure that the branch is free from harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

The language mirrors prior years’ efforts (see last year’s here; sentences two through four are identical; sentence one has been updated in light of the release of two workplace conduct reports) and once again demonstrates the bipartisan drive to conduct oversight over a branch that has not done enough to keep courthouses free of misconduct.

Parsing the language (we’ve added sentence numbers that are not in the text), the reports described in the first sentence are here (GAO) and here (Working Group).

The law described in the second sentence is the CAA, which required Congress to apply to itself many of the same employment laws that apply to the private sector and the executive branch, and from which the judiciary was exempted, save for writing a report the year after it was passed on the extent to which its employment policies “mirror” or “apply to” those in the rest of the bill (they don’t; they’re much weaker).

Regarding sentence three, there’s no central repository of complaint adjudications, so theoretically an order can come out and no one would be the wiser, so the Committee here wants to receive all the orders to potentially inform further oversight work.

And sentence four refers to this — i.e., the judiciary is far from being in compliance with the law mandating online disclosures and stock transaction reports.

“Administrative Office of the Courts.—(1) The Committee expects that (sic) the Judiciary to implement the recommendations provided by the Government Accountability Office and the Judiciary’s Workplace Conduct Working Group to improve the processes and procedures in place to prevent workplace misconduct, or report to the Committee the barriers to implementation that prevent the Judiciary from completing these reforms. (2) The Committee requests an update to the 1996 report requested by Public Law 104-1 on the application to the judicial branch of specified Federal labor laws.

“(3) The Judiciary is further directed to report to the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability (JC&D) Act orders that result in a finding of misconduct for any judge no later than 30 days after an order of the relevant judicial council becomes final or, for those orders where review by the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability (JC&D Committee) has been requested, no later than 30 days after the JC&D Committee’s review has been completed. (4) The Committee looks forward to the Judiciary’s compliance with the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act.”