So lengthy, George Santos, we hardly knew ye—and that was just about the issue.
This morning, Home members evicted certainly one of their very own for under the sixth time in historical past, terminating the congressional profession of the Lengthy Island Republican barely a 12 months after he gained election on a marketing campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, simply clearing the two-thirds threshold wanted to go. As with most different consequential votes this 12 months, a unified Democratic caucus carried the decision together with a divided GOP, whose members struggled with the choice of whether or not to trim their already slender majority by kicking Santos out of Congress. A slim majority of Republicans stood by Santos, whereas all however 4 Democrats voted to expel him.
Santos’s tenure was as memorable because it was temporary; to the bitter finish—and it was bitter—he appeared to be auditioning for a actuality present, or maybe the title position in a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. In the end, a Republican Social gathering that has largely embraced a former president indicted in 4 separate legal instances was unwilling to supply the identical assist to a freshman member of Congress whom a big majority of GOP lawmakers wouldn’t have acknowledged earlier than January. The vote instructed that some moral line stays {that a} Republican politician can’t cross with out reproach—at the least if that particular person is just not named Donald Trump. The place precisely that line sits, nevertheless, is unclear.
Republicans largely stood by Santos via earlier efforts to oust him this 12 months after a federal grand jury indicted him on costs of wire fraud, cash laundering, false statements, and theft of public funds; only a month in the past, the Home overwhelmingly rejected an expulsion decision throughout social gathering strains. Then got here a damning report by the Home Ethics Committee that alleged in placing element simply how flagrantly Santos had deceived his marketing campaign donors. He used marketing campaign funds on OnlyFans and Botox, amongst different salacious tidbits investigators uncovered. “Consultant Santos sought to fraudulently exploit each side of his Home candidacy for his personal private monetary revenue,” the report concluded. “He blatantly stole from his marketing campaign.”
Santos denounced the report and customarily denied the allegations, however he has refused to supply a selected protection of his actions. Nonetheless, Republican leaders resisted expelling him. Speaker Mike Johnson privately urged Santos to resign with the intention to spare his social gathering the troublesome vote of eradicating him. However Santos, who had already introduced that he wouldn’t search a second time period subsequent 12 months, was completed with social gathering loyalty. “If I go away, they win,” he informed reporters, accusing his colleagues of “bullying” him.
Johnson tried to strain Santos, however he wouldn’t foyer different Republicans to expel him. He described the expulsion decision as “a vote of conscience”—which is Capitol code for “vote nevertheless you need.” However within the hours earlier than immediately’s vote, he and Majority Chief Steve Scalise informed reporters that they’d vote to save lots of Santos.
The explanation GOP leaders would shield Santos was plain: With such a small majority, they couldn’t spare a single vote, even one as ethically and legally compromised as his. “Do you assume for a minute if Republicans had a 25-seat majority, they’d care about George Santos’s vote?” Consultant Pete Aguilar of California, the Home Democratic caucus chair, requested earlier this week. “They wanted him to vote for Speaker McCarthy. They wanted him to vote for Speaker Johnson. That’s the one cause why he’s nonetheless a member of Congress.”
A number of Home Republicans acknowledged that the social gathering may in poor health afford to jettison Santos when it has had sufficient bother passing payments as is. The contingent pushing most aggressively for expulsion was Santos’s New York Republican colleagues, who had been each personally appalled that he had slipped into Congress alongside them and most probably to endure politically from his continued presence. A handful of GOP-held seats in Lengthy Island and upstate New York—together with the one previously held by Santos—may decide whether or not Republicans maintain management of the Home subsequent 12 months.
Santos gained his aggressive seat in 2022 after in some way evading the scrutiny that often accompanies carefully fought Home races; not till weeks later did The New York Instances report that he had virtually fully invented his life story. Santos had lied about attending a prestigious prep faculty and incomes levels from Baruch School and NYU. He lied about engaged on Wall Avenue for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He stated that his grandparents survived the Holocaust and that his mom was working within the Twin Towers on 9/11. Each had been lies. “He has manufactured his total life,” Consultant Marc Molinaro, a fellow New York Republican, stated yesterday in a flooring speech arguing for Santos’s expulsion.
Publicly, the Republicans who voted with Santos—primarily staunch conservatives—argued towards his removing on procedural grounds. The one different lawmakers the Home has expelled had been both members of the Confederacy throughout the Civil Struggle or convicted of crimes in court docket. Ousting Santos based mostly on accusations alone, these Republicans stated, would set a harmful new precedent and overturn the need of the voters who despatched him to Congress. But none of them was really prepared to vouch for him. “I rise to not defend Geroge Santos, whoever he’s,” Consultant Matt Gaetz of Florida stated in a flooring speech, “however to defend the very precedent that my colleagues are prepared to shatter.”
Santos was a performer till his final moments in Congress. “I can’t stand by quietly,” he declared on the Home flooring. It was one assertion of his that was indisputably true. Santos was a ubiquitous presence within the days main as much as the vote, prepared to assault anybody standing towards him. Throughout a three-hour look on X (previously Twitter) Areas, he accused his colleagues of voting whereas drunk on the Home flooring. When one Republican, Consultant Max Miller of Ohio, referred to as Santos a “criminal” to his face, Santos replied by referring to him as “a woman-beater,” dredging up allegations that Miller had bodily abused his ex-girlfriend. (Miller denied the accusations.) Lastly, Santos tried one final little bit of retribution by submitting a movement to expel Consultant Jamaal Bowman of New York, the Democrat who pleaded responsible final month to a misdemeanor cost for falsely pulling a fireplace alarm en path to a Home vote.
“It’s all theater,” Santos declared yesterday with no trace of irony, on his penultimate day as a member of Congress. He had scheduled a press convention outdoors the Home chamber, utilizing the Capitol dome as a picturesque tableau. Within the background, nevertheless, was a special icon: a rubbish truck, presumably there to take out the congressional trash.
