WASHINGTON, D.C. – Built in the 1970s and opened in 1982, the Hart Senate Office Building is a place where some notable things have happened, like the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices David Souter and Sonia Sotomayor – and the time someone who clearly wasn’t a big fan of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sent an anthrax-laced letter to him that was sent straight to the Hart, so to speak.

According to the website for the U.S. Senate, among other things, the Hart was designed as “a building for the computer era,” featuring “two-story duplex suites (that) allow a senator’s entire office staff to work in connecting rooms.”

Now, I don’t know Senator Ben Cardin personally, so I can only speculate as to what sort of issues he wants his staff working on while at the Hart, but recent evidence suggests one thing he does NOT want his staff to do inside the spacious confines of the Hart is film gay porn.

“I was angry, disappointed,” Cardin said of learning that a staffer had used the Hart as a set for some surreptitious adult content creation. “It’s a breach of trust. All of the above.”

The footage was first reported by The Daily Caller, which maintained the grand media tradition of calling such things “sex tapes” despite the fact that nobody has recorded a video on ‘tape’ for decades. According to the report, the “leaked amateur pornography” depicts a “congressional staffer having anal sex with an unknown man in the Senate hearing room.”

“The alleged staffer can also be seen in a photo, naked on all fours, looking back at the camera on the table where Senators often sit to ask questions during a hearing,” the report adds. “It appears to be unprotected sex.”

I’m glad the Daily Caller added that last detail, because up until then, I was thinking “what’s the big deal here?” But it’s one thing to have anal sex in the Hart Building and quite another to have unprotected anal sex in the Hart Building. That sort of privilege is reserved for the Senators themselves, obviously. We can’t have unelected individuals butt-boning in the Hart, because that could undermine the public’s confidence in the Senate or the broader U.S. Congress, a body which, as I’m sure you know, historically enjoys sky-high approval ratings.

Following the report, deeply serious public servants like Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia soberly analyzed the implications of the “leaked sex tape,” demonstrating the sort of dignity and high-brow civil discourse we have come to expect from the Republican party.

Heck of a week for the Left. Gay porn in the Senate, swearing in ceremony on child porn in Virginia, tranny tap dancers in the White House, and Satanic statues in Iowa.

What else am I missing? https://t.co/MIUaf715fq

— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) December 15, 2023

To be fair, Collins isn’t wrong. It was a heck of a week on the Left. He may not be as eager to gab about the sort of week it was on the Right, though.

In any event, I think the whole incident should serve to give the American electorate great confidence in our leaders in Washington. Yes, take heart, America: Our national legislators might not be too good at handling minor matters like writing laws that are Constitutional, passing a budget, funding the very government of which they’re a part, approving military promotions, crafting an effective immigration policy or supporting our allies overseas, but when it comes to staffers having unsanctioned (and unprotected!) butt sex in the Hart Building, your government will swing into action with alacrity!

“Over the weekend when I learned about it, I made sure that… the appropriate steps were taken,” Cardin told reporters on Monday. According to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, those appropriate steps included shit-canning the staffer who took a staff up his shit-can.

I do have to hand it to Cardin’s unidentified staffer on one point, however: Even Mark Twain didn’t have the foresight to come up with a Congressional quip that covers this situation.

Hart Senate Office Building image by the Architect of the Capitol agency (public domain)