What is in the water on C Street?


Some epidemiologist ought to investigate this. There is a building on C Street in Washington DC which houses the offices of a fervent evangelical Christian contingent of conservative politicians, who are all, of course, paragons of probity. Except…something funny has been going on. Three of them have been publicly humiliated for their inability to keep their pecker in their pants.

Leisha Pickering said in the lawsuit filed this week that her husband and the woman dated in college, reconnected and began having an affair while he was in Congress and living in a building where several Christian lawmakers reside on C Street near the U.S. Capitol. Chip Pickering is the third Republican with ties to the building at 133 C Street SE to find his personal life making headlines in recent weeks, after Nevada U.S. Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

He cast himself as a defender of decency, particularly on television and the Internet, and was among House members urging then-President George W. Bush to declare 2008 “the National Year of the Bible.”

Another lawmaker who lived at the C Street house, Ensign, a member of the Christian ministry Promise Keepers, stepped down from the Senate Republican leadership in June after admitting he had an affair for much of last year with a woman on his campaign staff.

Just days after the story broke, South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina. He apparently never lived in the house, but has said he turned to “C Street” for counsel and solace while having the affair.

They’re Christians, so it is simply inconceivable that they could have lapsed so far from the strict morality of their faith unless something underhanded is going on: some liberal probably spiked their water supply with Viagra, or sprayed aphrodisiacs into the air ducts.