Married Republican Rich McCormick and Rep. Beth Van Duyne’s torrid affair took Capitol Hill by storm…here are other lawmakers who started dating and even got married in Congress

Reps. Rich McCormick and Beth Van Duyne made their relationship public after DailyMail.com reported that he filed for divorce and was often seen with her, but they are far from the first couple to meet and fall in love on Capitol Hill.

In a field that requires overlap between professional and personal, the highly ambitious, sometimes clumsy staffers who support the U.S. government often meet and find spouses at work.

Others are embroiled in scandalous love affairs that have rocked the halls of Congress.

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York is a famous matchmaker in his office, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, boasted last year that his office had 20 married couples.

And a handful of House members have preceded McCormick and Van Duyne in dating while both were in office.

DailyMail.com provides an overview of the details of those relationships:

Married 2007: Representatives Connie Mack and Mary Bono Oswald

California Republican Mary Bono married singer Sonny Bono in 1986, became mayor of Palm Springs from 1988 to 1992 and was elected to Congress in 1998, where she served until 2013.

Sonny, of the duo ‘Sonny and Cher’, had been elected to Congress in 1994 and after he died while skiing in 1998, she ran in the special election to succeed him.

But Florida Republican Connie Mack wouldn’t take office until 2005.

After Sonny, Mary was briefly engaged to country drummer Brian Prout and married for 18 months to Wyoming businessman Glenn Baxley.

She married colleague Mack in 2007 and changed her name to Mary Bono Mack, but the couple divorced in 2013. Bono and Mack were the third couple to serve in Congress together.

In 2012, Connie Mack lost his primary for a Senate seat in Florida and Mary lost re-election to the House of Representatives. A source told the Washington Post that losing their election and no longer being together in Washington led to their split.

Since 2015, Mary Bono has been married to former astronaut Stephen Oswald.

Mack, whose birth name is Cornelius Harvey McGillicuddy IV, remarried international development expert Jennifer Key in 2018 and has worked as a lobbyist since leaving Congress.

Married 1994: A House Floor Proposal for Representatives Bill Paxon and Susan Molinari

Paxon and Molinari were both New York Republicans who came to Congress and won in a league of their own. Paxon won a Buffalo House seat in 1988 and Molinari won a special election for her father’s seat in 1990.

They started dating soon after and married in 1994 after proposing on the House floor.

“What she said was, ‘Yes, I want to marry you, but get off the floor,’” Paxon told the Associated Press.

They each left the House in the late 1990s, had two children together and moved permanently to the Washington, DC area.

Molinari became a host for CBS before becoming Google’s vice president of public policy from 2012 to 2018. She is now co-chair of VERITY NOW, a group dedicated to “equity in vehicle safety.”

Paxon took up lobbying and at one point lobbied for Boeing, which was now embroiled in controversy.

Married 1989: Senator Olympia Snowe and Governor John McKernan meet in Congress

Republicans Snowe and McKernan met and began when they were both serving in the state legislature, and they overlapped in Congress from the time McKernan joined in 1983 until 1987, each holding one of two seats in the House of Representatives in Maine fulfilled.

Snowe served in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 1995. The couple married in 1989, after McKernan assumed the governorship in 1987, making Snowe both Maine’s first lady and a House representative.

Snowe became a senator in 1995 and served until 2013.

While the pair had nearly identical voting results in Congress, they even both switched from opposing aid to the Nicaraguan rebels to later supporting such aid. The couple is still married today.

Married 1976: Andrew Jacobs from Indiana and Martha Keys from Kansas

For Democrats Jacobs and Keys, it must have been love at first sight: the couple married just a year into their careers in Congress.

Keys lost her re-election race in 1978, but Jacobs remained in office until 1997. Keys went on to President Bill Clinton’s now-defunct Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

The couple divorced in 1981.

May 2024: Beth Van Duyne and Rich McCormick confirm relationship

Earlier this month, Glamorous Republican Rep. Beth Van Duyne broke her silence on the romance with married Georgia Republican Rich McCormick, confirming that they are “happily in a relationship.”

DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that the pair had developed a particularly cozy relationship just as McCormick and his wife filed for divorce.

Footage from the March 7 State of the Union address shows McCormick caressing Van Duyne’s arm, and sources say this is common for the apparently loved-up couple.

They have been caught arriving and leaving events together late at night, and multiple eyewitnesses have spotted the pair holding hands just off the House floor.

Van Duyne told DailyMail.com that Rich and his wife are both “incredible people” and that his marriage has been “over for quite some time.”

“His marriage has been over for a while, if I understand correctly, he filed for divorce.”

‘I am single. We are both parents of adult children and empty nesters. We have a happy relationship and beyond that it is a personal matter.’