“You know who’s going to get hurt by this?” a member of Congress asked me recently, referring to the about-time uprising of women against predatory men. “Women.” He explained that male members of Congress are now going to be reluctant to hire a woman when they have the option of hiring a man for a job, and that very attractive women would be particularly at a disadvantage in obtaining jobs on Capitol Hill. (Buxom is out.) Self-protection, in other words, might well lead to a new form of discrimination. And this could travel beyond elected politicians, though they’re feeling especially worried now.

Members of Congress have been speaking uneasily among themselves ever since Al Franken was drummed out of the Senate by many of his Democratic colleagues in early December. Nobody wants to talk about it on the record, but politicians in both parties and in both chambers remain disturbed by how Franken was dealt with by some of his Senate colleagues. In particular, a number of Senate Democrats were bothered by how Franken was treated, as was a large but unmeasurable portion of citizens. And some of the unfortunate implications are already becoming clear.

The whole thing happened with startling speed—no deliberations, no process, and no pause for thought, it seemed. The main actors against him got increasingly worked up—and they struck at the first opportunity. The entire episode, from when the first complaint about Franken was aired to when he announced unhappily that he’d leave the Senate, took three weeks; his self-appointed prosecutors turned on a dime, at first supporting and then throwing process (consideration by the Senate ethics committee) to the wind. There wasn’t even a meeting of the party caucus to deliberate and discuss. (Male Democratic senators with misgivings didn’t want to get in the way of the women.) A group of Democratic women senators got up a head of steam; its ringleader, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, declared, a doctrine of “zero tolerance.” “Enough is enough!” became not just an expression of exasperation but a policy.

With this precedent members of Congress (and others as well) became vulnerable to the acts of people not of good will. What is the protection against someone or several people deciding to gang up on a member of Congress by inventing incidents?

What’s particularly disturbing about the Franken affair is that a senator was driven from the seat he was elected to because he’d become inconvenient. The death knell came with the seventh—or was it the eighth?—complaint about Franken touching or patting or whatever some woman’s bottom, or in one case (following the original charge of his forcing his tongue down the complainer’s throat) asking for a kiss. Almost all of these charges were of actions before he came to the Senate and several were anonymous. But it was less these acts—immature and jerky, to be sure—that threatened to overturn the verdict of the voters of Minnesota, than the fact that the charges were continuing to be brought. (An option would be to demand good behavior or else, and leave it to the next election.)