In what’s sure to be a major test of the Speech and Debate Clause, South Carolina man Brian Musgrave on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit against crazy Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s speech to the House floor last month in which she accused Musgrave, a business associate of her ex-fiancee Patrick Bryant, and two others of engaging in sex trafficking, Palmetto Politics reports.

“Perhaps the defendants felt that the message was so powerful that a little collateral damage in the form of Brian Musgrave’s name and reputation was acceptable,” Musgrave’s lawyers wrote in the complaint, filed in a Charleston federal court. “It is not acceptable to Brian Musgrave. It is not acceptable to his family. While the speech and debate clause of the United States Constitution affords broad protection to members of Congress acting as part of its deliberative process, it does not transform the floor of Congress into a sanctuary for defamation, nor does it protect Congresswoman Mace’s extra-Congressional defamatory statements surrounding her speech.”

It was pretty goddamned obvious that was why Mace read it on the floor rather than tweeted it in a video or whatever, so any sane, functional justice system would probably use this case to set a new minimum reasonable standard for where the limitations are rather than just letting them say whatever the fuck they want and then retroactively shoehorning in some specious “legislative purpose” to dodge consequences. Key words there being “sane” and “functional” so who knows what the hell’s going to happen. You could do a lot worse for a test case. Would help if Musgrave doesn’t end up accepting a settlement before such precedent is set, even if it takes years. If he’s unafraid of discovery then he should be willing to see this through. It’d be some measure of justice after Lindsey Graham, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, Scott Perry, Ron Johnson, and all those other twats got away from with the 2020 coup attempt simply because of the Speech and Debate Clause.