SCOOP: Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has a new rule she'd like to impose on her colleagues — don't live with your staff. Former Mace aides had just one question: where, exactly, is she drawing the line?
Last month, Mace introduced a pair of resolutions — one barring House members from sexual relationships with their employees, the other from living with them, married couples excepted. The pitch was tidy: "a boss and a roommate should never be the same person," she said, adding that "no staffer should ever be coming home at night to the person who signs their paycheck."
The resolutions came amid reports of improper sexual relationships between members and staffers — including those involving former Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) — and questions over living arrangements with staff, including reporting that Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) had lived with a senior staffer at his Capitol Hill residence.
Fair enough. But several people who worked for Mace say her own history makes that line harder to draw than her bill lets on.
Multiple former staffers tell Sources Say News that during Mace's first campaign, a senior campaign aide lived in an apartment above the garage at her home on Daniel Island.
Then there's Washington. In the spring of 2022, a second former staffer — a senior aide at the time — was flying up to D.C. from the district each week and, rather than expensing a hotel, was put up at Mace's townhouse. "Rather than spend money on the hotel, they basically forced me to stay at her place," the former aide told Sources Say News. Mace, the aide said, "wanted me in the district when she was in the district and then in DC when she was in DC" — so they crashed in the basement.
By the aide's telling, it was close quarters. "There was a curtain, there wasn't even a door, which was really weird," they said. Three people close to the office corroborated the account. The coffee maker was down there too, so most mornings the congresswoman would come make coffee a few feet from where the aide had slept, the two of them separated by that same curtain. "The workday would start for me at like 6:30 when I would hear the coffee maker going off," the aide said. "It's like, oh, shit, that's my boss."
"It was way too much contact with the boss for a work week," the aide said.
To get out of the house on the nights they weren't put up at a hotel, the aide said, they briefly crashed with another staffer while hunting for a permanent place after moving up from the district.
Mace's office rejects the premise. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Office of Congresswoman Nancy Mace said: "The suggestion that Rep. Mace lived with her staff, directed her employees to stay at her home, or maintained a 'crash pad' for federal employees is false. Rep. Mace did not and has never lived with her staff, and her home was never a crash pad for federal employees. Official travel and lodging records are maintained in accordance with applicable reporting requirements. Publicly available records include multiple examples of the office paying for hotel lodging for staff travel to Washington, D.C."
One source pushed back on the curtain account, arguing it was a separate private space in an English-basement setup, and that the 2019 campaign stay was a brief arrangement for an aide who needed a place after previously living out of state.
And a proponent of the Mace bill drew a sharp distinction between letting a staffer stay in a pinch and actually living with a staffer while engaging in predatory behavior that creates improper power dynamics — the bill, they said, was written to target the latter, not last-minute platonic stays in a separate residence.
Mace wants a clear rule against living with staff. Whether her own basement would have cleared it may come down to whether you remember a door or a curtain.
