The House’s Santos Stain

A s the U.S. House of Representatives melted down on Tuesday, one congressman was able to keep his sense of humor about the defenestration of Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

Responding to a social-media post suggesting he become the new speaker, Sort-of-Representative George Santos responded, “I’ve already said I have no intention of being Speaker . . . Again.”

The joke, of course, references Santos’s own history of fabulism — the tsunami of lies that carried him to his seat in Congress. And it’s not even a particularly original (or good) joke: I made an identical quip back on January 3, the day McCarthy was initially chosen for the post.

But in this case, the humor ostensibly comes from Santos’s brazenness — that he has stones large enough to joke about how he effectively stole a congressional seat through lies and deceit. And the deceit didn’t stop there: He is currently facing federal charges of wire fraud, money-laundering, stealing public funds, and lying on federal disclosure forms.

Nevertheless, he thinks this is all a big joke. And so, evidently, do a lot of Americans.

But Santos’s continued presence in the House is a permanent stain on Congress. The fact that he gets to sit in the House chamber and vote on public policy should horrify anyone with even a tiny bit of respect for the American system of government. (In fact, Santos doesn’t even take these duties seriously. After Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman was caught on camera pulling a fire alarm — sans fire — in a House building before an important vote, Santos proposed a rib-tickling amendment requiring fire-safety training for members of Congress.)

Of course Santos, who until a few years ago used the name “Anthony Devolder,” is simply the rational conclusion of the Donald Trump style of politics, in which the inability to feel shame or remorse is the ticket to a livelihood built on attention-seeking. Ironically, Trump has grown stronger in his party while falsely accusing President Joe Biden of stealing an election. Santos actually did steal an election and remains in good standing with the party.

Ironically, it is grifters like Santos who caused Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in the first place. With sane people largely having been purged from the GOP, they have been replaced with rabid lunatics who turned voters off and held Republicans to a slim majority in the House. Had the party run normal people, their majority would be much larger and McCarthy wouldn’t have to deal with Matt Gaetz and his merry band of mouth breathers. (Ultimately, a GOP faction couldn’t abide McCarthy’s working with Democrats to keep the government open but seems to have no problem keeping a lying thief like Santos in the conference.)

Santos and his ilk get to stay in office because the party needs his vote. His continued presence in the House is simply power over principle. And it further erodes public confidence in a body that is actually supposed to tackle serious things. Congress can decide when we go to war, how we handle inflation, and how much comes out of our paychecks every month. But Congress is chock-full of unserious people, which drives public confidence down, which leads to the election of even more unserious people as the antidote.

And this is all okay with a GOP leadership group that allows Santos to hang around, using his ill-gotten seat as a personal branding platform while under indictment on felony charges. Everyone knows Santos stole his seat. Imagine a burglar breaking into your house and getting to live there until his legal proceedings are over. There’s no chance you would pretend everything is fine while the burglar awaits trial from your couch. And yet Santos gets to sit in the House chamber, casting votes to change American laws (many of which will live on forever).

And yes, sure, politicians are allowed to lie to voters. It happens in every race, and voters have some responsibility in assessing candidates’ honesty. But Santos’s lies are on another level. For instance, he claimed not only that his mother was Jewish but that his maternal grandparents had fled from the Nazis to Brazil. This was a total fabrication; he was raised Catholic by a Catholic family. (Leading to the all-time dodge, “I never claimed to be Jewish. . . . I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”)

Santos claimed his mother died in the Twin Towers on 9/11 — but his mother died in 2016. He claimed to be a star volleyball player at Baruch College, despite no record of his ever having attended. And he claimed to have worked on Wall Street at both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but neither business had any record of him.

Perhaps most damning, he claimed to run a charity for sick dogs — but he didn’t deny pocketing the funds he raised for that cause.

There are those who say that simply lying to voters isn’t reason enough to expel him from the House. But this is another byproduct of the Trump years — claiming exoneration because one’s behavior hasn’t (yet) risen to the level of a criminal conviction.

But is any behavior short of being thrown behind bars acceptable for the people we elect to represent us? Do we have no minimum standards of conduct or honesty by which to determine that a candidate is fit for office?

We don’t need a judge and jury to determine that Santos gained his seat fraudulently. Waiting for the legal system to crack down on him for activities ancillary to his fraudulent campaign means he wins. He gets the attention he wants and has a measure of power, all while mugging and cracking jokes. Is that the New American Dream?

And yes, the House has launched an ethics investigation into whether Santos broke laws or, as alleged, engaged in sexual misconduct. But it has been six months since the probe was announced. You can expect a finding at the very moment House Republicans don’t need his vote to pass legislation anymore.

For centuries to come, historians will marvel at the success of Santos’s fraud and the rank opportunism of Republicans in tolerating him. Santos’s tenure will eventually end, but it will represent an eternal black mark on the House. It taints the GOP, today and in perpetuity. In the words of P. J. O’Rourke, “the Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”