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History was made on Capitol Hill this week, though not quite in the triumphant, glass-ceiling-smashing way the sisterhood once imagined.

The moment arrived when California congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove leaned in, adjusted her microphone, and delivered a question that ricocheted through Washington’s echo chamber of gossip, ambition, and barely concealed schadenfreude:

“Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as Director of Department of Homeland Security, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?”

For a beat, those attending the Judiciary Oversight hearings seemed to stop breathing.

Not because Washington is unfamiliar with sexual scandal—quite the opposite. But because it is extraordinarily rare (and possibly the first time in U.S. history) that a woman serving in high office was questioned so bluntly and publicly about sleeping with an employee. Her subordinate.

For decades, the script has run the other way. The powerful man, the younger woman, the career-ending revelation. (Well, for her always, for him occasionally.)

After insisting “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Bill Clinton turned an entire presidency into a grammar lesson with the immortal line, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” John Edwards was interrogated about whether he had impregnated a campaign videographer while his wife was dying of cancer. David Petraeus, the four-star general turned........

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