New York Republicans Abandon George Santos

The political world was engrossed over the Christmas holidays with the saga of George Santos, the newly elected Republican representing Long Island’s North Shore. This was partly because Santos’s many fabrications were just such a wild, cinematic story, and partly because it was a couple of slow news weeks. Now that the drama over Kevin McCarthy’s fight for the speakership has concluded, attention is focused again on Santos. We know that Santos has lied about a lot of things, enough to make him politically a dead man walking if he faces the voters again in 2024. Less clear is whether Santos has problems besides just serial fabulism. It is very hard, after all, to get kicked out of Congress for being a liar. Senator Richard Blumenthal claimed falsely to have “served in Vietnam,” and senator Elizabeth Warren falsely claimed Cherokee heritage when applying for jobs as a law professor. The last president was a pathological BS artist who won the job in part because his opponent and her ex-president husband were perhaps America’s most notorious liars; the current president has arguably the longest track record in American political history of telling false stories about himself, his credentials, and his life experience. If we kicked all the liars out of Congress, neither house could muster a quorum.

But Santos may have other issues. His murky finances could put him in much deeper trouble. The new leftist Brazilian government, eager to curry favor with the Biden administration, has revived a 2008 case against Santos for passing checks from a stolen checkbook under a false name. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has reportedly opened a federal investigation into Santos’s finances in the Eastern District of New York. Nassau County district attorney Anne Donnelly, a Republican elected in 2021, has publicly announced her own probe:

“The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning,” said Brendan Brosh, a spokesperson for [Donnelly]. “The residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

What to do about Santos in the interim is a trickier question. Some Democrats argued that the House should just refuse to seat him, but it has no power to refuse. The Supreme Court in 1969 held in Powell v. McCormack, siding with corrupt New York Democrat Adam Clayton Powell Jr. against his own party’s speaker, that “the Constitution leaves the House without authority to exclude any person, duly elected by his constituents, who meets all the requirements for membership expressly prescribed in the Constitution.” In any event, the thin Republican majority, engrossed with the speakership fight, was unlikely to refuse to seat Santos.

But now that McCarthy is speaker — a closely contested race in which he needed Santos’s vote — the question of removing him from the House enters a different phase. Two House Democrats have filed an ethics complaint, which triggers an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. That could conceivably lead to a reprimand, a censure, or even expulsion. The Constitution explicitly authorizes expulsion, but the bar is a high one: Article I, Section 5 states that “Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.” Nobody has ever been expelled for lying, or even for unethical behavior short of criminality. Powell himself only lost his seat when challenged in a primary by Charles Rangel (who was himself later censured by the House). Of the five expulsions in House history, two followed convictions for bribery-related offenses (most recently Jim Traficant in 2002), and the other three were for joining the Confederacy and serving in its military. It would require a concerted effort by McCarthy to break with the whole history of the House to whip 77 members of his caucus to vote to expel Santos for anything short of a criminal conviction.

That leaves attempting to pressure him into resigning by appealing to a sense of shame that has thus far not been much in evidence in Santos. That is the step the Nassau County Republican Party has taken today, with Nassau County Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo declaring, “George Santos’ campaign last year was a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication. . . . He deceived the voters of the 3rd Congressional District, he deceived members of the Nassau County Republican committee, elected officials, his colleagues, candidates, his opponents and even some of the media. . . . He’s disgraced the House of Representatives and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople.” Hempstead town supervisor Don Clavin added, “He’s a national joke, he’s an international joke, but this joke’s got to go.”

Nick Langworthy, a freshman Republican congressman serving with Santos and still the state GOP chair, echoed this, saying in a press release, “I support the Nassau Republicans’ decision today to request the resignation of George Santos. It’s clear that he cannot be an effective representative and it would be in the best interest of the taxpayers to have new leadership. I will continue working with our local elected officials to ensure that trust and dignity are restored to the 3rd congressional district.” For now, at least, Santos insists he’s not going anywhere.

As a matter of sheer bloody-minded partisanship, while it is prudent for other Republicans to distance themselves as far from Santos as possible, it would be bad for the party’s House caucus if Santos resigned. McCarthy is sitting on a 222-212 majority, under which he will lose any vote in which five or more of his caucus defects (assuming Democrats remain united). The majority shrinks to 222-213 assuming Democrats win a special election in a deep-blue seat in Virginia that will be vacant until a special election on February 21. If Santos resigned, McCarthy’s margin would drop from five votes to four, putting him further at the mercy not only of the House Freedom Caucus but also of moderates or really any other group of dissenters on a particular question. Moreover, holding New York’s third congressional district would be a challenge. Santos won 54-46 on the strength of Lee Zeldin’s coattails and a red wave across Long Island that continued from the 2021 election. But before that, Republicans had not won the seat on Long Island’s North Shore — the literary home, fittingly, of Jay Gatsby, the most famous fabulist in American fiction — in 40 years. Santos lost in 2020 to incumbent Tom Suozzi, the former Nassau county executive who saw the writing on the wall of the mood in his district and stepped down to mount a failed primary challenge to New York governor Kathy Hochul. Suozzi may not want to return to the House, but if he decided to run again, he would be a formidable opponent without the Zeldin–Hochul race on the ticket.

All of that said, short-term bloody-minded partisanship should never be the only consideration. Santos really is a stain on the House even by the historically low standards of that body, and the Nassau GOP is hardly known for being ethical sticklers; one suspects that the decision to call for Santos’s resignation is an indication that the party thinks more and worse shoes are apt to drop soon. Santos may be able to gut it out for a while longer simply because there is no workable mechanism to remove him short of an indictment and criminal conviction, but the longer he hangs on, the harder it could be for Republicans to contest the seat in a special election, and the more he will be a distraction from the rest of the House GOP. Either way, New York Republicans are not waiting to find out before making their position crystal clear.