The House just voted 311 to 114 (with two cowardly members voting “present”) to make New York Congressman George Santos only the sixth in history to be deemed unworthy of an elected seat. The GOP members mostly supported the draconian punishment despite facing a tough race in the special election Santos’s disgrace now triggers. If I were a voter in that Long Island and Queens district, I’d be tempted to vote for the Democrat just to make the Republican Party pay for allowing a fraud and a crook like Santos to be its nominee. Of course, the Democrats and the local news media also share some blame for not doing due diligence to uncover important facts about a wildly unqualified candidate, but the GOP has to be first in line to be held accountable after Santos himself.
Yesterday, facing his likely humiliation, the biggest phony ever elected to Congress put his essential sliminess on full display, vowing revenge on his party and, like so many villains in movies about conspiracies and corruption, swearing that ‘if I go down, I’ll take all of you down with me!’
“I will do the same thing that members did to me and go to the Office of Congressional Ethics, all throughout today and tomorrow and report, everything that I think is relevant to the committee for them to look into,” said Santos. He’s already promised to file a complaint about the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Mad Fire Alarmist. Yes, Bowman should be sanctioned, but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.
Santos’s reaction to being expelled is a stinking pile of rationalizations, as discussed here. His pledge to get revenge is another bit of signature significance. If Santos had any ethical instincts at all, any concept of why he was being kicked out of Congress, any flicker of conscience, dignity, responsibility or decency, he would have exited with a statement expressing his regret for his past actions, apologizing for soiling (well, further soiling) the reputation of the body he was elected to serve in, and promising to devote his future activities to honorable public service, while acknowledging that there is, at this time, no reason to believe him. Then it might have been said of his leaving Congress, in the manner of Malcolm’s description of MacBeth at his execution,
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.
But George Santos doesn’t possess those character traits: he’s a throbbing sociopath, and unlike more successful sociopaths in our government, he’s not smart or wily enough to hide it.
Ethics Alarms 
Santos is one of a kind.
He’s the ONLY ONE of the other 20 (both the House and the Senate) with a D After His Name.
PWS
ERRATUM: R After His Name
PWS
I had gone a bit back-and-forth with my congressman on Santos earlier this year. He was more inclined to let the voters in Santos’ district make the decision at the ballot box and I chided him pretty good for that stance, responding that Santos “disenfranchised” his entire district and shouldn’t be allowed to serve until 2024 when he could be removed now, giving the district a chance at a re-do.
I’m glad to see my congressman – along with all the Representatives in my state – ultimately voted to expel him. Even if that ends up hurting Republicans in the near term, it’s the right move. Congress regains a smidgeon of respect for vomiting Santos out of the assembly.
Can we get Schumer to expel Menendez?
I mean he trafficked in underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, helped his buddy scam Medicare and lined his pockets (literally) with gold bars given to him from foreign sources..
I am beginning to think that such behavior is considered acceptable in the Senate. And they say the House was for the rabble and the Senate was for the deliberative. I suppose that is true he deliberately did this things.
So if his poison pill declarations cause any more expulsions, would that be zugswang? Or just ironic? This actually gives the House a chance to clean house…..
What happens if he runs again and wins next November. No one can claim he defrauded the voters and if they vote him out again we will have a real issue.
It might have been better to wait and hope a better candidate runs. The party does not choose who runs in House races. The party can endorse one over another but that’s about it.
They can deny him or her party support and funding, and run another candidate against him.
Agreed but I don’t think the RNC puts money in races that they don’t think viable. I have no idea if they provided him any funding last election and I do not recall if they chose to work to recruit a better candidate. The RNC put zero dollars into the campaign of Neil Parrot ( who is a choir boy compared to many in Congress) in the 6th district in MD after the district was gerrymandered to eliminate any viable Republican challenger.
“the biggest phony ever elected to Congress”
The biggest phony ever elected to Congress so far. I have a feeling we won’t have to wait long for a new contender to emerge. The quality of political candidates has been sharply declining for decades, but we seem to have hit an inflection point fairly recently where that decline has gone from merely rapid to downright precipitous.
At the rate we’re going, I fear that soon we’ll be pining for the good old days when guys like Santos were simply liars, phonies, theives, and frauds, and not serial killers and cannibals…