Outside the Beltway

Congressional offices have a porn problem, but it’s not exactly what you think.

Since 1983, Larry Flynt has sent the monthly magazine he founded, Hustler, to each and every member of Congress.

The dirty mag comes in a plain manila envelope, fairly undetectable to the poor intern or staffer tasked with opening the mail. And every month, there it is: Hustler, featuring dozens of naked or scantly dressed women, vulgar comics, and articles, some satirical, on politics, society, and sex.

It’s not like members of Congress haven’t tried to stop the magazines from coming. They just can’t stop it legally.

Following the complaints from 264 congressional offices in 1984, the U.S. Postal Service asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the mailings. But that request failed when the court ruled two years later that the delivery of the magazine could not be stopped. The court wrote:

Receiving Hustler once each month would not unduly burden a Member of Congress. Members are not forced to read the magazine or other of the mail they receive in volume. We cannot imagine that Congressional offices all lack wastebaskets.

For Hustler, it was a First Amendment issue. This was Flynt’s right to petition the government, he argued, and the court agreed. Or as Flynt told The Hill in 2011, “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics.”

Thirty years later, the congressional subscription count remains the same: 535. The magazine is not sent to members of the executive branch, though.

Larry Flynt has been trolling the American establishment for nearly half a century now, and this is just another example of that. As for the Members of Congress, well, I’ll just leave that your imaginations.