Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has said he will speak to the young congressman who alleged senior politicians invited him to "orgies".
Website Politico reported that several Republicans complained about North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn's conduct at a closed-door meeting — although only Arkansas congressman Steve Womack was named.
Cawthrn told the Warrior Poet Society podcast in an episode released on Monday that coming to Washington DC had been a real eye-opener for the wheelchair-bound 26-year-old.
The young congressman was asked if the Beltway was anything like how it was portrayed in House of Cards, referring to the Netflix remake of the classic 1990s BBC TV series.
"I mean, the sexual perversion that goes on in Washington — being kind of a young guy in Washington with the average age of probably 60 or 70," Cawthorn said. "I look at all these people, a lot of them I've looked up to through my life, I've always paid attention to politics."
"Then all of a sudden you get invited to — 'Hey, we're gonna have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come,' and I'm like, ‘What did you just ask me to come to?'" he said. "And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy."
Cawthorn also said drug abuse and "espionage" were rife among denizens of what former president Donald Trump dubbed "the swamp".
"There's some of the people that are leading the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine in front of you and it's like wow, this is wild," Cawthorn said.
Asked by CNN about Cawthorn's performance as a congressman, North Carolina senior Senator Richard Burr answered: "That’s for his constituents to figure out but clearly he's been an embarrassment at times."