If it wasn't for that

Lists of the "hottest" people in Congress are working from a fairly shallow pool. For one thing, they are constrained by the average age of people in Congress,  which tends toward the "middle" of middle age and older, and that category rarely lends itself to physically attractive hotness.  (What a drag it is getting old).

So when I looked at one of these lists and discovered South Dakota's Congresswoman Kristi Noem, I was a bit surprised.  She does fit the frame of hot, and this is with three children as well.  I wouldn't go so far as to put her in the MIL... category, but she's got some eye appeal.

Representative Kristi Noem, R-South Dakota

But the problem is... she's Republican.  Conservative Republican, of course, in the mold of Sarah Palin, with whom she is sometimes compared.  To get elected in the Red stateness of South Dakota, that's probably necessary.  And she has taken some rare surprising stands at odds with GOP dogma on energy, probably because she's from a subsidized farm state, but she's pro-life (i.e., against women's right to govern their own reproductive rights), and she appears to toe the line of the GOP view on the environment.

To her credit, though, she expressed frustration that the dysfunctional Congress didn't pass a farm bill, which is mainly the fault of the GOP anyway.