More stories

  • in

    Republicans Tap Mazi Melesa Pilip to Run for Santos’s Seat

    Party leaders believe Mazi Melesa Pilip has the potential to be a breakout star. But she has little political experience and her policy views are largely unknown.Republicans battling to hold onto the New York House seat vacated by George Santos chose on Thursday another relatively unknown candidate with a remarkable biography but a thin political résumé to run in a special election next year.After extensive vetting, Republican leaders selected Mazi Melesa Pilip, a local legislator who was born in Ethiopia, served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces and first ran for office in 2021 vowing to fight antisemitism.It was a bold gamble by Long Island Republicans, a group better known for nominating older, white establishment figures. Republicans believe Ms. Pilip, a 44-year-old mother of seven, has the potential to become a breakout star before the Feb. 13 special election, particularly at a moment when Israel’s war with Hamas is reordering American politics.“She is the American success story,” said Peter King, a former New York Republican congressman involved in the nomination. “Some people have superstar capacity. She walks into the room, people notice her, they listen to her.”Ms. Pilip, however, lacks many of the credentials typically prized in a competitive congressional race. She has almost no experience raising money, lacks relationships with key party figures outside her affluent New York City suburb and has never faced the kind of scrutiny that comes with being a candidate for high office.In fact, beyond fierce advocacy for Israel and support for the police, she has taken no known public positions on major issues that have shaped recent House contests. That includes abortion rights, gun laws and the criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    Finding George Santos’s Replacement Is Proving Difficult for Republicans

    Party leaders have vowed not to repeat the vetting mistakes they made with the expelled congressman. But getting to yes is proving messy.If New York Republicans had hoped to quickly and cleanly turn the page on the embarrassing saga of George Santos, the week since his expulsion from Congress has not exactly gone as planned.While party leaders hunkered down in the Long Island suburbs to game out the critical special election to replace him, it emerged that one of their top candidates for the nomination, Mazi Melesa Pilip, was not technically a Republican at all, but a registered Democrat.Another Republican who had entered the race earlier this year was convicted of taking part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Word leaked that party officials were interviewing a more serious contender: a former state assemblyman known to have potentially damaging ties to Mr. Santos through a bizarre business proposition that one person involved said resembled the classic email scheme with a Nigerian prince.And records were unearthed in news reports showing that another front-runner, Mike Sapraicone, had not only been sued for suppressing evidence in a murder case as a New York City police officer but later made political contributions totaling $40,000 to an unexpected recipient: the race’s Democratic nominee, Tom Suozzi.The torrent of revelations washed away the message of order and unity that top Republicans sought to project in the wake of Mr. Santos’s hurricane. And suspicions that many of the unsavory disclosures about the candidates had been seeded in the press by rival Republican camps left some fretting that the party was playing straight into Democrats’ hands.“It definitely looks messy,” said Chapin Fay, a Republican political consultant advising some of the candidates. “Just let the Republicans kill themselves even before a candidate is chosen.”In many ways, the Republicans’ predicament is the result of their determination to avoid a repeat of Mr. Santos. The federally indicted serial fabulist slipped past Republican and Democratic vetters in 2020 and 2022, winning the seat connecting Queens and Nassau County last fall before his entire life story began to unravel as a series of fictions and outright frauds.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman leading the selection process, views Mr. Santos as a stain on his personal record. He said he would likely only select a candidate already well known to the party and has also retained outside help from research firms to identify major vulnerabilities before making the nomination.“There’s a personal thing to some people that, Hey, a mistake was made, this guy has blemished our party, this is our chance to correct it,” Mr. Cairo said in a recent interview, expressing confidence that the party would unite behind the best candidate.But that takes time, and as Mr. Cairo’s deliberations stretch into another week, candidates and their allies appear to have taken matters into their own hands, as they hunt for damaging information to boost their cause or hurt a rival’s. Property records have been checked. Old podcasts dug up. Voting records scrutinized.Even Mr. Santos took a break from recording lucrative videos on Cameo to stir the pot, urging his followers to call Mr. Cairo to insist that he not select “a Democrat in Republican skin” like Ms. Pilip or Mr. Sapraicone.Democrats have had their own awkwardness. On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul made Mr. Suozzi drive to Albany to all but grovel for her support. But there was never really any doubt that the well-known former congressman would be his party’s pick, and Democrats quickly united around his nomination.Mr. Fay, who began his career as an opposition researcher, argued that “mudslinging” now could actually help inoculate the eventual Republican nominee against key weaknesses by the time the Feb. 13 special election heated up.For Ms. Pilip in particular, who has become a top contender on the strength of a remarkable political biography, being outed as a registered Democrat may not be such a bad thing in a district that leans slightly left. In fact, crossover appeal has helped before: Ms. Pilip, a Black former member of the Israel Defense Forces, flipped a local legislative district in 2021 while running on the Republican Party ballot line.In a statement, Mr. Cairo indicated that Ms. Pilip’s registration, which was first reported by Politico, was known to party leaders. He said they had long supported her because she was “philosophically in sync with the Republican team.”In another reflection of her status as a formidable candidate, an unsigned, untraceable email was sent to multiple reporters Friday morning seeking to tarnish her name by including a link to a photograph on social media of Ms. Pilip embracing Mr. Santos.The hits on other Republican hopefuls may be more problematic.Take Mr. Sapraicone. On Monday, Politico reported on a 2021 lawsuit accusing him and other former New York Police Department detectives of having coerced a false confession and suppressed exonerating evidence that kept a man behind bars for two decades. (He denied knowing about the suit.)On Wednesday, an old news report resurfaced about his donations to Mr. Suozzi. And on Thursday, Politico ran another item reporting how on a podcast earlier this year, the Republican described once being afraid of a police officer because he was Black. The Sapraicone campaign said he had shared the story to show how he had grown to embrace “diverse communities” as a police officer.In an interview, Mr. Sapraicone said he was determined not to get rattled.“This is all new water to me,” he said. “I see these sharp elbows coming left and right here. I don’t think any of this stuff is productive no matter where it’s coming from.”Philip Sean Grillo, who declared his candidacy in May, certainly did not help the party’s cause when he was convicted in the Jan. 6 case. A wave of headlines tied him to Mr. Santos and the special election, though his candidacy has never been taken seriously.Party leaders also had to contend with sticky potential issues in private involving more serious candidates, like Michael LiPetri, the former Republican state assemblyman. Mr. LiPetri is well liked within Long Island Republican circles, but his nomination would almost certainly open the party to more Santos-tinged attacks.The New York Times reported last summer that Mr. LiPetri worked with Mr. Santos to approach a campaign donor with an unusual proposition. They asked the donor to create a limited liability company to help a wealthy unnamed Polish citizen buy cryptocurrency while his fortune was evidently frozen in a bank account. The deal never went through.Mr. LiPetri, who sought to play down his role when The Times initially disclosed his involvement, did not respond to requests for comment.Gleeful Democratic operatives said they could package any of the disclosures into general election ammunition if given the opportunity.“We wish the Grand Old Party the best in their flailing endeavors,” said Ellie Dougherty, a spokeswoman for House Democrats’ campaign arm, calling the other side “dysfunctional.”But not every Republican was worrying. One veteran of hard-fought campaigns on Long Island said his fellow Republicans should quit the hand-wringing.“All the sniping between the people who support X and Y and Z?” said the Republican, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato. “Doesn’t mean anything in the finals.” More

  • in

    McCarthy’s Exit May Create Even More Headaches for the Tiny G.O.P. Majority

    The former speaker’s decision to leave his seat a year early could affect control of the House, the legislative agenda and his party’s efforts to keep its majority in the 2024 election.Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that he would leave Congress came as little surprise to his closest colleagues, but his decision to do so a year before the end of his term poses challenges for his party. It will shrink Republicans’ already razor-thin majority in the House as they face a number of issues in the coming months that will require near-unanimous party support.The departure of Mr. McCarthy, who was his party’s strongest fund-raiser in the House and spent two election cycles helping to build the Republican majority, also could put a dent in the G.O.P.’s ability to rake in campaign cash, although he has said he wants to continue to play a role in politics.Here’s how Mr. McCarthy’s departure could affect the House and his party.A slim majority will get even slimmer.Republicans started the year acknowledging that one of their biggest challenges would be keeping their party unified as their midterm victories delivered a tiny majority. They had 222 members while Democrats had 213, leaving little room for defectors and making it easier for a small number of disgruntled Republicans to influence policy and vote outcomes.They could afford to lose no more than four votes on any bill if all Democrats showed up and voted against them. Any more than that would doom G.O.P. legislation.With the expulsion last week of former Representative George Santos of New York, Republicans now have only 221 members, meaning their four-vote margin has shrunk to three. Any more defections than that would result in a 217-to-217 tie or give the Democratic side more votes than the Republican one.With Mr. McCarthy gone, Republicans will enter the new year with 220 votes, leaving the same margin since they could still lose three votes and be ahead of Democrats, 217 to 216.A special election for Mr. Santos’s seat is set for Feb. 13, and Democrats hope to recapture the politically competitive district, which President Biden won in 2020. That would further erode the Republicans’ edge.A winter shutdown showdown could become even more unmanageable.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California will have 14 days after Mr. McCarthy’s final day to call a special election, which must take place about four months later. The Bakersfield-anchored district is solidly Republican, meaning that a G.O.P. candidate is likely to win the race to serve out the remainder of his term. But that won’t happen before mid-January, when lawmakers face the first of two deadlines for funding the government.Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, has struggled to push critical legislation through the House, and a slimmer majority would probably empower the rebellious hard-right wing of his party to double down on its policy demands ahead of the deadlines, the second of which is in early February.The smaller majority could also affect the fight over an emergency national security spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine, along with help for Israel in its war against Hamas and border security funding.On Wednesday, Republicans blocked the measure in the Senate. The bill would face an uphill battle in the House, where Republican support for Ukraine’s war effort is dwindling.Republicans will lose their best House fund-raiser.For years, Mr. McCarthy has traveled to hundreds of districts across the country, bringing in millions of dollars in campaign cash for candidates and helping Republicans win control of the House in 2022. He has said he planned to remain engaged in Republican politics.“I will continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office,” Mr. McCarthy said in announcing his plans to leave the House in The Wall Street Journal. “The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders.”During his time as speaker, Mr. McCarthy brought in $78 million for his colleagues’ re-election efforts, more than 100 times the amount of money Mr. Johnson had collected before becoming speaker.His support of new candidates will be aided by a campaign account with more than $10 million at his disposal. Even after leaving office, Mr. McCarthy can use the campaign funds to establish a political action committee or directly support other campaigns. He has signaled that he would like to play a substantial role, and many lawmakers and aides believe he may intervene in party primaries to target the far-right Republicans who led the push to oust him from the speakership.Republicans are holding their breath for more exits.More than three dozen incumbents from both parties in both chambers have said they will not seek re-election. If even a handful more House Republicans leave in the coming months, it could wipe away their majority before a single vote is cast in the 2024 election. Another Republican, Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, has announced that he will leave Congress in several months to become the president of Youngstown State University, though he has not said precisely when.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and one of Mr. McCarthy’s strongest allies, expressed her frustration over the eroding majority in a post on social media, saying, “Hopefully no one dies.” More

  • in

    Bowman Is Latest House Democrat to Face a Primary Over Israel Stance

    George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, told The New York Times he would run against Mr. Bowman, a rising star of the Democratic left, next year.After months of public deliberation and prodding from donors aligned with Israel, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, said on Wednesday that he would mount a Democratic primary challenge against Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York.The decision set the stage for a potentially explosive contest next year that promises to test not only the growing Democratic divide over the war in the Middle East but the durability of the party’s progressive wing.In an interview, Mr. Latimer drew sharp contrasts between himself and Mr. Bowman, one of left’s most vocal critics of Israel. He dismissed the incumbent’s calls for a cease-fire as premature and called a recent protest outside the White House, where the congressman accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a political stunt.“It’s about results, not rhetoric,” said Mr. Latimer, who has deep ties to the Democratic establishment. “So much of politics has turned into that sort of showmanship — how you look in front of the cameras.”He was expected to officially begin his campaign with a video announcement later on Wednesday, just days after returning from a wartime visit to the region.The nascent contest echoes primary fights breaking out from Pittsburgh to Detroit since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack, as pro-Israel Democrats try to oust members of the House “Squad” pushing for a cease-fire. Like the other challengers, Mr. Latimer is expected to benefit from millions of dollars in outside spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other special interest groups.The race in the New York City suburbs, though, may be uniquely complex. It pits a charismatic Black progressive with a growing national profile against an old-school white liberal with deep local support. And it will play out in a district that is both home to one of the country’s most influential Jewish communities and also nearly half Black or Latino.Mr. Latimer said he shared many of Mr. Bowman’s progressive priorities but would avoid the incumbent’s “showmanship.”Gregg Vigliotti for The New York TimesMr. Latimer tread carefully around many of those fault lines as he outlined his candidacy this week, insisting that he was preparing for a campaign that would go well beyond the issue of Israel.Mr. Latimer, in his second term as county executive, urged voters not to judge him on his age, 70, or the color of his skin. Citing his four decades in elected office, he said would continue many of the progressive priorities on housing, climate change and transportation that Mr. Bowman has championed. And he avoided outright attacks on the incumbent beyond charging that Mr. Bowman was more interested in making his name than tending to his district.“If you ignore that turf because you’re a national figure and more interested in being on the national stage, then you are neglecting the needs of that community,” Mr. Latimer said.The challenge comes at a moment of profound political vulnerability for Mr. Bowman, 47, and not just because of his stance on the war. The congressman is still dealing with the repercussions of pleading guilty in October to pulling a false fire alarm in a House office building. And he has just $185,000 in his campaign account, according to recent filings.AIPAC, which privately offered Mr. Latimer its support months ago, could easily swamp that amount on its own. Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for the group, declined to discuss the group’s spending plans this week but denounced Mr. Bowman as a representative of “the anti-Israel extremist fringe.”Mr. Bowman’s advisers and allies say defeating him may be far more difficult than his foes anticipate. Some of the left’s most influential figures were already lining up to fight back, determined to show the staying power of their movement three years after they first helped Mr. Bowman, a former middle school principal, topple a powerful three-decade incumbent, Eliot L. Engel.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mr. Bowman’s best-known ally, circulated a fund-raising appeal on his behalf. Left-leaning groups, including New York’s Working Families Party and Justice Democrats, have pledged resources. For now, each appear to see value in framing the primary as a conflict as one with pro-Israel special interests, not the county executive.“It’s not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges and is funded by the same Republican megadonors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz have recruited a candidate for this race,” said Emma Simon, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bowman’s campaign.The primary battle is one Democrats had wished to avoid. The party already hopes to flip six Republican-held swing seats in New York next year, which is key to taking back the House majority. Some Democrats have expressed concern that a pro-Israel advertising blitz against Mr. Bowman would inadvertently tarnish the party’s candidates in competitive races in neighboring districts to the north and west.Now that the matchup is underway, though, it poses a quandary for Democratic leaders, particularly Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Mr. Jeffries, the top House Democrat, has said he would continue the party’s longstanding policy of supporting incumbents like Mr. Bowman, even if his own views on Israel are more conservative. But Mr. Latimer said he had not received a call from Mr. Jeffries asking him not to run, and the House leader may soon have to decide how hard to fight to protect Mr. Bowman.Mr. Bowman has refused to tone down his advocacy despite growing pressure from Jewish constituents and fellow Democrats.His allies argue that there is good reason to believe many voters agree with his views, but that for many, Israel will not be a decisive issue when they cast their primary ballots next June.About half of voters in the district, which stretches from the north Bronx through many of Westchester’s liberal suburbs, are Black and Latino, according to census data. The figure is even higher among Democratic primary voters. By comparison, about 10 percent of all voters and about 20 to 25 percent of Democratic primary voters are Jewish.Mr. Bowman has repeatedly said he is standing by his position on Israel for a simpler reason: He believes in it.Mr. Bowman has refused to tone down his advocacy despite growing pressure from Jewish constituents and fellow Democrats.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesHe summarized his views outside the White House last week, where he joined protesters calling on President Biden to support a bilateral cease-fire. He used terms that most Democrats have objected to, including “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” in describing Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza, which has killed some 15,000 people, according to the local health authorities. He accused the United States of “being complicit” in those deaths. But he also condemned those targeting Israelis or Jews and repeated his earlier denunciations of Hamas.“Calling for cease-fire does not mean we support Hamas, does not mean we support the killing of Israelis or Jews, does not mean we support antisemitism,” he said. “We are calling for cease-fire because we don’t want anyone else to die.”In the interview, Mr. Latimer said he, too, was eager to see the bloodshed in Gaza end, but only after Hamas returned the remaining Israeli hostages it abducted on Oct. 7 and agreed “to step aside from violence.” Anything short of that would amount to unilateral disarmament by Israel, he argued.Mr. Latimer said he did not “know enough” to judge whether Israel’s counteroffensive had violated international law. “I’m not a secretary of state,” he said.He also rejected Mr. Bowman’s proposal for the United States to place conditions on the billions of military aid it provides to Israel. “That is a matter that I think is best left to the presidential administration,” Mr. Latimer said.He was more pointed about attempts by Mr. Bowman and his allies to build public pressure on Mr. Biden through protests and media appearances. Mr. Latimer called Mr. Bowman’s appearance outside the White House “the classic response of somebody who has been in government a couple of years.”“If you want to influence the policy of the president, you begin with the dialogue you have with your other members of Democratic Caucus,” he said. “When you have a consensus movement, that becomes more impressive to an executive.” More

  • in

    Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return

    Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday.Governor Hochul wanted Mr. Suozzi to agree to a series of demands in exchange for her backing.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“The governor will allow his nomination to move forward,” Brian Lenzmeier, Ms. Hochul’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement confirming the broad outlines of the meeting.Mr. Suozzi thanked Ms. Hochul for “a good meeting” that he said “cleared the air.”“At a time of strong political division, I offered to be another moderate voice as the governor works to solve problems and make progress,” he said.Mr. Suozzi will now have a little more than two months to prepare for what could be one of the most important off-year House contests in decades — the battle to replace Mr. Santos, a Republican, after his historic expulsion. A Democratic victory could undermine Republicans’ paper-thin House majority and build momentum ahead of next year’s general election.Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. She and others warned party leaders that Mr. Suozzi had real liabilities: He currently works for a lobbying firm, his 2022 primary run alienated some progressives and he has a history of losing key contests.But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans.He also has close relationships to two of the party leaders with significant sway over their special election nominee: Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, and Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the Nassau County and New York State Democratic Parties.Ms. Hochul was always the rub.Their mutual animosity had been well known to New York Democrats since last year’s primary for governor. Mr. Suozzi repeatedly referred to Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female leader, as an unqualified “interim governor.” He also accused her and her husband, a former federal prosecutor turned executive, of fostering a “culture of corruption” in Albany.It is unclear if she ever would have — or could have — unilaterally blocked Mr. Suozzi over Mr. Jeffries’s strong preference. But New York’s special election process granted Ms. Hochul unusual leverage to exact potential revenge. Unlike in normal contests, nominees for special elections are chosen by party leaders, not primary voters. That gave Ms. Hochul a double say, both as governor and as Mr. Jacobs’s de facto boss.On Monday night, she used it to her political advantage. After pushing Mr. Suozzi to make the case for his candidacy, including with polling and a fund-raising plan, the governor revisited two issues they clashed over as candidates.First, she said she would need Mr. Suozzi to vocally support abortion rights, including the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions. Mr. Suozzi earned top marks from Planned Parenthood in Congress, but his past comments have led abortion rights advocates to question his commitment.The governor also sought to ensure he would not run advertisements disparaging his own party. Ms. Hochul and her allies have long believed that his campaign pronouncement on the threat of crime and corruption in the 2022 primary softened the ground for Republican attacks.Mr. Suozzi agreed, but Ms. Hochul let him drive away Monday night without her blessing. She would wait until after a night’s sleep to deliver the news. More

  • in

    Patrick McHenry, Former Interim Speaker, Will Leave Congress

    The North Carolina congressman, who leads the House Financial Services Committee, said he would join the growing ranks of lawmakers exiting Congress amid intense dysfunction.Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, who made history as the first interim speaker of the House after Republicans ousted their own speaker and struggled for weeks to agree on a successor, said on Tuesday that he would leave Congress at the end of his term.The announcement by Mr. McHenry, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, added him to the growing ranks of lawmakers who have announced that they will depart the House and the Senate, many of them citing the historic dysfunction of Capitol Hill.“This is not a decision I come to lightly,” Mr. McHenry said in a statement. “But I believe there is a season for everything and — for me — this season has come to an end.”The bow-tied and bespectacled Mr. McHenry, 48, arrived in Congress as an unruly bomb thrower in 2005 and has matured into one of the more sober-minded leaders in a Republican conference whose actions are more often driven by the attention seekers. He was named speaker pro tempore after Republicans deposed Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is Mr. McHenry’s close ally.Mr. McCarthy is also expected to announce in the coming days that he will not seek re-election, and many of his colleagues do not expect him to finish out his term after he has discovered the life of a rank-and-file member to be a painful existence.Mr. McCarthy’s brutal ouster prompted the House’s first invocation of a post-9/11 crisis succession plan that requires the speaker to secretly designate an interim stand-in should the post become unexpectedly vacant. Those plans never envisioned that the crisis that would lead to a vacancy would be that members of the party controlling the House would choose to overthrow their own speaker.As Republicans struggled for three weeks to coalesce around any candidate to replace Mr. McCarthy and the House remained paralyzed, Mr. McHenry was under intense pressure to take on more power and interpret his role more broadly.But he steadfastly refused, even as members asked him to bring to the floor an uncontroversial resolution in support of Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and hundreds taken hostage. And when Republicans floated a plan to hold a formal vote to allow Mr. McHenry to preside over legislative business, he let it be known he was against it.Mr. McHenry argued that interpreting his role as anything more than simply convening the House to take a vote for a new speaker would only create more incentive for the Republican feuding to drag on and even grow worse. He made it clear that he harbored no ambition of becoming the speaker himself, and in fact was actively hostile to the idea.Mr. McHenry had chosen not to run for any leadership position during this Congress, in part because he believed that the most effective way to wield power in the House was to not allow anyone to have leverage over him. But Mr. McCarthy had a way of roping him back in.During Mr. McCarthy’s tenure as speaker, he cut out the official leadership structure, whose members he distrusted, and relied heavily on Mr. McHenry as his handpicked adviser to help handle debt ceiling negotiations with the White House and avert a government shutdown.Mr. McHenry’s departure from a seat in a solidly Republican district was not expected to have much impact on the race for control of the House, where his successor was all but certain to be another Republican.His decision not to seek re-election may have had as much to do with his own future prospects in the House as it did with overall dysfunction. Mr. McHenry will be term-limited out of his chairmanship at the end of next year.In announcing his decision not to seek another term, Mr. McHenry tried to play down any narrative that the spate of retirements and exits was due to the House becoming ungovernable.“There has been a great deal of hand-wringing and ink spilled about the future of this institution because some — like me — have decided to leave,” he said. “Those concerns are exaggerated. I’ve seen a lot of change over 20 years. I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn.”He added: “Evolutions are often lumpy and disjointed but at each stage, new leaders emerge. There are many smart and capable members who remain, and others are on their way. I’m confident the House is in good hands.” More

  • in

    McCarthy Eyes Exit From House After Speakership Loss

    The California Republican is still angry at his ouster and has struggled to acclimate. His colleagues expect him to retire, but he has taken his time deciding.At an emotional evening news conference immediately after he was removed as speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy gave an inconclusive answer about whether he would remain in Congress.“I’ll look at that,” he said then.Over the past two months, Mr. McCarthy has given the life of a rank-and-file member a hard look and discovered it to be a painful existence after having been at the pinnacle of his party in the House for more than a decade.These days, Mr. McCarthy, famous for his preternaturally sunny California disposition, has been hard to cheer up. He no longer attends the conference meetings he used to preside over, and at times has struggled to contain his anger at the Republicans who deposed him. (He denied the accusation from one of them, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, that he elbowed him in the kidney in a basement hallway of the Capitol.)He has also struggled to make peace with the idea that it’s time to go, even as California’s Dec. 8 filing deadline to run for re-election draws near and his colleagues expect him to leave.“When you spend two decades building something, it’s difficult to end that chapter,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of Mr. McCarthy’s closest friends in Congress. “His life has been building the Republican majority and attaining the third-highest office in the land. It is difficult for any mortal to deal with an abrupt end and determine his next chapter.”But the current chapter has grown increasingly untenable for him.As he has made his way around the Capitol contemplating his options for the future and cycling through various stages of grief over his merciless political downfall, Mr. McCarthy has retained small perks from his old life that serve mostly as painful reminders of all that has been taken away.He still has the kind of security detail furnished to the person second in line to the presidency, but he has been removed from the speaker’s suite of offices in the middle of the Capitol that serve as the building’s power center. He has participated in high-profile engagements, such as a recent speech to the Oxford Union and an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit, but those were booked before his ouster.Many colleagues still consider him a skillful convener of people with institutional knowledge about the workings of a Republican majority he helped build. But his inexperienced successor, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has not sought him out for any advice on managing the fractious Republican conference. And Mr. McCarthy has had to watch from the sidelines as Mr. Johnson has made some of the same choices that led to his own downfall — such as working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown — and, at least so far, paid little price.Mr. McCarthy has labored to acclimate.“After any stressful situation, it takes a while for the body to normalize,” Mr. McHenry said of the former speaker. “And when you talk about the extremes of political ambition, which is required to attain the speakership, it is even more dramatic to wring those chemicals out of your body to return to being a normal human.”On Instagram, where Mr. McCarthy recently shared pictures of his dogs hanging out in his Bakersfield, Calif., district office, many of the people commenting on the picture chimed in to remind him that despite his handle, “@SpeakerMcCarthy,” he was the speaker no more. (The title is technically his for life.)House Republicans are beginning to move past Mr. McCarthy’s removal as they navigate business with Mr. Johnson at the helm. But Mr. McCarthy has not finished processing his defenestration. He is someone who has never enjoyed being alone, and an emptier schedule leaves more time to spend in one’s own head.As unpleasant as it may be to hang around Congress in his diminished state, Mr. McCarthy has been forthright about the difficulty of deciding whether to leave politics, and when.“I just went through losing, so you go through different stages,” Mr. McCarthy said in a brief interview after his DealBook appearance on Wednesday in New York City. “I have to know that when I go, that there’s a place for me, and what am I going to do, and is that best?”Mr. McCarthy booked a speaking engagement at the DealBook summit while he was still speaker. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMr. McCarthy said he was taking his time in making a decision about whether to leave Congress, in part because he did not want to make a hasty decision he might come to regret.“I have to know that if I decided that wasn’t for me and I leave, I don’t want a year from now to think ‘Aw, I regret — I shouldn’t have left,’” he said. “So if I take a little longer than most people normally, that’s just what I’m going through.”Some center-leaning Republicans are pressing him to stay.“You have a lot of members who haven’t been here that long,” said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside organization allied with the congressional caucus of the same name. “You need some senior statesmen to teach the members how the process works, and he’s one of the last ones left.”Ms. Chamberlain added, “On a personal level, I can completely understand if he decides to leave. On an institutional level, it would be a shame to lose him.”If Mr. McCarthy were to exit Congress right away, it would also shrink the already-slim Republican majority, which went from four to three seats with the expulsion on Friday of Representative George Santos of New York. (As Mr. Johnson presided over the vote to oust Mr. Santos, Mr. McCarthy did not show up to register a position.)Still, it is highly unusual for a former speaker to choose to stick around. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has broken with tradition and embraced her emeritus status, describing herself as “emancipated” from the pressures of her old job.In September, the 83-year-old San Francisco Democrat surprised some of her colleagues by announcing she would run for another term. But Ms. Pelosi is at the end of a career that made history — she was the first woman to hold the post of speaker — and was able to leave her post, which she held for a cumulative eight years, on her own terms. The new generation of Democratic leaders in the House treats her with reverence and continues to solicit her advice on big decisions.In contrast, the awkward position of Mr. McCarthy, 58, who held the top job for little more than eight months and made history as the first speaker ever ousted, has been all too clearly on display.Ever since January, when Mr. McCarthy agreed to rule changes to appease the hard right in order to win the gavel, he and his allies had anticipated that his speakership could end exactly the way it finally did. But that has not left him feeling any less bitter about it.Though Mr. McCarthy denied intentionally shoving Mr. Burchett, he responded angrily to the accusation.“If I hit somebody, they would know it,” he told reporters, his voice rising with irritation. “If I kidney punched someone, they would be on the ground.”He has gone on television to scold Mr. Burchett and the other colleagues who brought him down, and pushed the Republican conference to exact some retribution against them even though there appears to be little appetite to do so.“I don’t believe the conference will ever heal if there’s no consequences for the action,” Mr. McCarthy told CNN in a recent interview. He also said that Mr. Burchett and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also voted to oust him, “care a lot about press, not about policy.”Despite his inner turmoil and painful power detox, Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that he aims to use his remaining time, influence and campaign money to help his party keep control of the House. That may also serve a rejuvenating purpose for him if he chooses to intervene in congressional races to try to defeat the Republican members who voted to oust him and bolster the candidacies of those aligned with him.“I may not be speaker,” he said during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “But I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Republicans win.”Robert Jimison More

  • in

    The Undoing of George Santos

    Lying is one thing in politics. But lying and stealing for the sake of Ferragamo and Hermès?In the end, it may have been the luxury goods that brought down George Santos.Not the lies about going to Baruch College and being a volleyball star or working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Not the claims of being Jewish and having grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust and a mother who died of cancer as result of 9/11. (Not true, it turned out.) Not the fibs about having founded an animal charity or owning substantial real estate assets. None of the falsehoods that have been exposed since Mr. Santos’s election last year. After all, he did survive two previous votes by his peers to expel him from Congress, one back in May, one earlier in November.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.At this point, the discussion around lies and politics is so familiar, it has become almost background noise.But taking $6,000 of his campaign contributions and spending it on personal shopping at Ferragamo? Dropping another couple thousand at Hermès? At Sephora? On Botox?Those revelations, documented in the House Ethics Committee report released Nov. 16, seemed simply too much. Despite the fact that Mr. Santos had announced that he would not seek re-election, despite the fact that he is still facing a 23-count federal indictment, Representative Michael Guest, the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, introduced a resolution the week before Thanksgiving calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion from Congress. On Friday, the House voted in favor — 311 to 114, with two voting present — making Mr. Santos only the third representative since the Civil War to be ejected from that legislative body.George Santos Lost His Job. The Lies, Charges and Questions Remaining.George Santos, who was expelled from Congress, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.As Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington, wrote in The Conversation, Mr. Santos’s lies provoked “resentment and outrage, which suggests that they are somehow unlike the usual forms of deceptive practice undertaken during political campaigns.”It was in part the ties that had done it. The vanity. The unabashed display of greed contained in the silken self-indulgence of a luxury good.“Material objects are at the heart of this thing,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “They expose what is seen as a universal character flaw and make it concrete.”Mr. Santos appeared in his trademark prep school attire at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, N.Y., in May, when he pleaded not guilty to federal charges of wire fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhite collar crime is often abstract and confusing. Tax evasion is not sexy. (Nothing about taxes is sexy.) It may get prosecutors excited, but the general public finds it boring. To be sure, the House Ethics Committee report, all 55 pages of it, went far beyond the juicy details of designer goods (not to mention an OnlyFans expense), but it is those details that have been plastered across the headlines and stick in the imagination. They make the narrative of wrongdoing personal, because one thing almost everyone can relate to is luxury goods.These days they are everywhere: unboxed on TikTok with all the seductive allure of a striptease; dangling by celebrities on Instagram; glittering from store windows for the holidays. Lusted after and dismissed in equal measure for what they reveal about our own base desires and human weaknesses, they are representative of aspiration, achievement, elitism, wealth, indulgence, escapism, desire, envy, frivolity. Also the growing and extreme wealth gap and the traditions of royalty and dictators — the very people the settlers (not to mention the Puritans) came to America to oppose.There’s a reason even Richard Nixon boasted in a 1952 speech that his wife, Pat, didn’t “have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.”As Mr. Wilentz said, it has been, and still is, “unseemly to appear too rich in Washington.” (At least for anyone not named Trump. In this, as in so many things, the former president appears to be an exception to the rule.)In the myth of the country — the story America tells itself about itself — our elected officials, above all, are not supposed to care about the trappings of wealth; they are supposed to care about the health of the country. “The notion of elected officials being public servants may be a polite fiction, but it is a polite fiction we expect politicians to maintain,” Mr. Blake said.Even if, as David Axelrod, the former Democratic strategist and senior fellow at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, points out, speaking of the amount of money needed to run for office these days, “office holders and candidates spend an awful lot of time rubbing shoulders with people of celebrity and wealth and often grow a taste for those lifestyles — the material things; the private planes and lavish vacations.”Mr. Santos at the Capitol in November, just before his third expulsion resolution was introduced.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIndeed, Mr. Santos is simply the latest elected official whose filching of funds to finance a posh lifestyle brought them to an ignominious end.In 2014, for example, a former governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, was found guilty on federal bribery charges of accepting $175,000 worth of cash and gifts, including a Rolex watch and Louis Vuitton handbags and Oscar de la Renta gowns for his wife from the businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., and sentenced to two years in prison. (The Supreme Court later vacated the sentence.) During the trial, the products were entered as exhibits by the prosecution — glossy stains on the soul of the electorate.In 2018, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of bank fraud and tax crimes after a Justice Department investigation revealed that he had spent $1.3 million on clothes, mostly at the House of Bijan in Beverly Hills, including a $15,000 ostrich jacket that set the social media world alight with scorn. More recently, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey was accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, among other bribes, in return for political favors.In each case, while the financial chicanery was bad, it was the details of the stuff — the objects themselves — that became the smoking gun, the indefensible revelation of moral weakness. And so it was with Mr. Santos.Even if, at one point, his appreciation of a good look may have made him seem more accessible — he reviewed NASA’s spacesuit and created a best- and worst-dressed list for the White House Correspondent’s dinner, both on X — it also proved his undoing. As the House Ethics Committee report read: “He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit.”And worse — for vanity, reeking of ostentation. That’s not just an alleged crime. It’s an affront to democracy.Audio produced by More