Aidan Maese-Czeropski

At the start of the week, The Spectator wondered how on earth Speaker Mike Johnson would get the Big, Beautiful Bill through the House, in the face of unified Democratic party opposition and seemingly intractable divides on the GOP side. The answer, it turns out, involved copious amounts of alcohol, side deals, naps, late-night staff shifts and the Democratic gerontocracy. Congressman Gerry Connolly’s sudden death on Wednesday shocked Washington. It also proved to be a boon to Johnson’s math. The Speaker ended up with more wiggle room, because one Republican who failed to vote slept through the late-night final tally. After months of debate, the House passed the bill 215-214; it now heads to the Senate, which is poised to change it and send it back.

A surprising item from Down Under: Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Senate staffer who was fired after he and his partner filmed themselves in flagrante delicto on Amy Klobuchar’s desk in Hart 216, has resurfaced in Australia after touring the world. Maese-Czeropski gave an interview to the Gay Sydney News about the fallout from his December 2023 rendezvous – which readers of this newsletter were the first to learn about. Maese-Czeropski, who worked as a legislative assistant for then-senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, says he spent “a little bit in the psych ward” after his firing, before moving to Sydney by way of South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. https://www.instagram.

Gay-PMG Grüezi from Switzerland, friends. A Cockburn spy was recently hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch at an Irish pub in Zurich’s Old Town when he was sat next to a large group of somewhat intoxicated KPMG Switzerland employees. It was quite the liquid lunch, with beers and wine flowing for hours and one staffer suggesting a round of shots, a move that was quickly rejected from the already too-far-gone group. One American employee of the firm was waxing lyrical about KPMG’s alleged hopelessly bigoted management.

Hart of darkness How do they while away the hours in Congress in the long gaps between passing shutdown bills? Cockburn caused something of a stir this time last week by revealing that a staffer for Senator Ben Cardin was spending his free time indulging in gay sex acts in the Hart Senate Office Building. He left the august duty of blurring and posting the offending video to Henry Rodgers and his comrades at the Daily Caller later that Friday. The clip revealed that the staffer, later unmasked as Aidan Maese-Czeropski, was having sex with his partner, German grad student Georg Gauger, at the desk formerly used by late senator Dianne Feinstein.  The internet was aflame all weekend — and the follow-ups came thick and fast.