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      George Santos Is Gone. What Happens to His Seat in Congress?

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      The expulsion of George Santos from Congress on Friday swept away one major political headache for Republicans, but it immediately set the stage for another: The party will have to defend his vulnerable seat in a special election early next year.The race in New York is expected to be one of the most high-profile and expensive off-year House contests in decades. It has the potential to further shrink Republicans’ paper-thin majority and offer a preview of the broader battle for House control next November.With towering stakes, both parties have been preparing for the possibility for months, as Mr. Santos’s fabricated biography unraveled and federal criminal charges piled up. More than two dozen candidates have already expressed interest in running, and labor unions, super PACs and other groups have begun earmarking millions of dollars for TV ads.“It’s going to be like a presidential election for Congress,” said Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat who once led his party’s House campaign arm. “It becomes ground zero of American politics.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has 10 days to formally schedule the contest after Friday’s lopsided vote to remove Mr. Santos. But both parties expect the election to take place in mid-to-late February, just over a year after he first took the oath of office.Unlike in a normal election, party leaders in Washington and New York — not primary voters — will choose the Democratic and Republican nominees. They were moving quickly to winnow the field of potential candidates, and could announce their picks in a matter of days.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.Democrats were expected to coalesce around Thomas R. Suozzi, a tested centrist who held the seat for six years before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a prolific fund-raiser and perhaps the best-known candidate either party could put forward. Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, is also running and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left.The Republican field appeared to be more fluid. Party leaders said they planned to interview roughly 15 candidates, though officials privy to the process said they were circling two top contenders, both relative newcomers: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Political analysts rate the district, stretching from the outskirts of New York City into the heart of Nassau County’s affluent suburbs on Long Island, as a tossup. President Biden won the district by eight points in 2020, but it has shifted rightward in three consecutive elections since, as voters fearful about crime and inflation have flocked to Republicans.Democratic strategists said they would continue to use the embarrassment of Mr. Santos to attack Republicans, blaming them for aiding the former congressman’s rise. But recapturing the seat may be more difficult than many Democrats once hoped.Local Republicans moved decisively to distance themselves from Mr. Santos last January, and the strategy has shown signs of working. When Long Island voters went to the polls for local contests last month, they delivered a Republican rout that left Democrats scrambling to figure out how to rehabilitate a tarnished political brand.“Anyone who thinks a special election on Long Island is a slam dunk for Democrats has been living under a rock for the last three years,” said Isaac Goldberg, a strategist who advised the losing Democratic campaign against Mr. Santos in 2022.“Politics is a pendulum,” he added. “Right now, it’s on one side, and it’s unclear when it’s going to swing back.”Republicans face their own challenges, though, particularly in an idiosyncratic contest likely to favor the party that can turn out more voters. Democratic voters in the district have spent months bemoaning their ties to Mr. Santos and are highly motivated to elect an alternative. It is unclear if Republican supporters will feel the same urgency their leaders do.“It’s been a frustrating year,” said Joseph Cairo, the G.O.P. party chairman in Nassau County. “I look at this as just the beginning to right a mistake, to move forward, to elect a Republican to serve the people the proper way, to elect somebody who is for real — not make believe.”The outcome promises to have far-reaching implications for the current Congress and the next.After Mr. Santos’s ouster, Republicans have a razor-thin majority. Thinning it further could hamper their short-term ambitions to pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and negotiate around a major military aid package for Israel.Whoever emerges as the winner in February would also likely become the front-runner for next fall’s elections and lend their party momentum as they prepare to fight over six crucial swing seats in New York alone, including a total of three on Long Island.Democrats believe Mr. Suozzi, who is currently working as a lobbyist, is best positioned to deliver. In his stints as a congressman and Nassau County executive, he took conservative stances on public safety and affordability that are popular among suburban voters. And his combative primary campaign for governor just last year may help him shake the anti-Democratic sentiment that has sunk other candidates.Jay Jacobs, the Democratic leader for the state and Nassau County, said he still intended to screen multiple candidates, including Ms. Kaplan, a more progressive former state senator who remains in the race, even as other candidates dropped out and coalesced behind Mr. Suozzi.Ms. Kaplan could get a boost from Ms. Hochul, who faced Mr. Suozzi in an ugly 2022 primary fight, during which he questioned her husband’s ethics and referred to her as an unqualified “interim governor.”The governor has pushed Mr. Jacobs and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, to reconsider whether Mr. Suozzi was their strongest candidate, particularly given his hesitancy to fully embrace abortion rights in the past, according to four people familiar with the conversations.But it is unclear if the governor would have the power to block Mr. Suozzi. Mr. Jeffries personally worked to lure the former congressman into the race earlier this fall, and Mr. Suozzi is close friends with Mr. Jacobs, who has told associates he is the likely pick.Republicans are proceeding more cautiously. They are wary of repeating their experience with Mr. Santos, who secured the party’s backing in 2020 and 2022 despite presenting them with a fraudulent résumé and other glaring fabrications that they failed to catch.This time, Republicans appear to only be considering candidates already known to party officials, and plan to engage a research firm to more formally vet potential nominees.Campaign strategists in Washington were said to favor Mr. Sapraicone, the former police detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, could afford to spend a portion of it in a campaign, but he would also enter a race with almost no name recognition or electoral experience.Local Republicans were pushing Ms. Pilip, a potentially mold-breaking rising star with a remarkable biography. She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, later served in the Israel Defense Forces and flipped a legislative seat in Nassau County in her 40s as a mother of seven.Other wild card candidates included Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker; and Jack Martins, a well-known state senator who has run for the seat before.Mr. Santos himself could theoretically run for the seat as an independent. But the task would be arduous and might jeopardize a more urgent priority: fighting charges that could put him in prison for up to 22 years. More

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      Republican George Santos expelled from Congress in bipartisan vote

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      The New York Republican, fabulist and accused fraudster George Santos has been expelled from Congress.The vote to expel Santos, the second since his election last year, required a two-thirds majority of those present. The final tally on Friday was 311-114, with two members recorded present and eight absent.Santos therefore becomes only the sixth member ever expelled from the US House. The first three fought for the Confederacy in the civil war. The other two were expelled after being convicted of crimes.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not been tried. A previous expulsion attempt, mounted by members of his own party, failed in part because senior Democrats voted no, citing the dangers of expelling members without convictions secured.But a damning report from the House ethics committee, detailing how Santos used campaign funds for purchases including travel, cosmetic treatment and luxury goods, changed the political equation.Democrats and Republicans introduced motions to force the expulsion vote this week. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, sought to persuade Santos to resign – an overture Santos rejected. In the event, Johnson and other senior Republicans voted not to expel. But nor did Johnson attempt to whip his party into line.A majority of Republicans, 112 of 222, voted not to expel. Five did not vote, 105 supporting the motion. Among the New York delegation, 22 members voted for expulsion. Three New York Republicans voted no: Santos himself, Claudia Tenney and Elise Stefanik, the House Republican conference chair.Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor, former US labor secretary and Guardian columnist, said: “George Santos may be gone from Congress, but a majority of Republicans voted against expelling him – including the entire House GOP leadership. The Republican party once again showed that it doesn’t really care about ethics or the law, only power.”Johnson took the gavel to announce the final vote tally. Santos, who stood through the vote with his coat round his shoulders, soon left the chamber.Sharon Eliza Nichols, communications director for Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic delegate for the District of Columbia, alluded to Cinderella when she said: “And just like that, without even a goodbye twirl, George Santos hopped in her carriage and departed.”But he has shown no sign of going quietly. On Thursday, railing against the looming vote, Santos attacked other members, introducing his own expulsion resolution against Jamaal Bowman (a New York Democrat who admitted pulling a fire alarm in a congressional office building, a misdemeanour) and calling Max Miller, a Republican from Ohio, an “accused … woman beater” in a clash on the House floor.Santos’s district must now hold a special election within 90 days. On Friday, the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, said she was “prepared to undertake the solemn responsibility of filling the vacancy in New York’s third district. The people of Long Island deserve nothing less.”Santos won the seat as part of a New York Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections last year, a key part of Democrats’ loss of control of the House.But as Santos’s résumé quickly unraveled under press scrutiny, alleged criminal behaviour, in Brazil and the US, was also brought to light.Amid a flood of increasingly bizarre stories, including about Santos’s past as a drag performer in Brazil and a claim to have been a volleyball star at a college he did not attend, Santos admitted embellishing his record but denied wrongdoing.Achieving notoriety, he made common cause with Republican extremists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a prominent Trump ally.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker from January until October, resisted taking action other than withdrawing committee assignments, in large part because the GOP controls the House by a slim margin and Santos backed McCarthy through 15 votes for speaker. In October, when the far right made McCarthy the first speaker ever ejected by his own party, Santos did not support the change.Democrats now hope to retake Santos’s seat, to reduce the Republican majority.In a statement on Friday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, said: “George Santos’s pattern of unethical and illegal conduct is shocking and continues to escalate. Expulsion from Congress was appropriate and overdue.“He should have resigned and saved Congress all this trouble. Now he’ll be remembered as only the third member of Congress since the civil war to be expelled.”Adav Noti, legal director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said the expulsion of Santos showed that “no one is above the law”, and “the power and potential of ethics enforcement”.“While it should not take violations as egregious as those committed by Santos for this system to work effectively … all Americans have the right to financial honesty from members of Congress, and to effective enforcement against any elected official who deprives the voters of that right.”So rapid was Santos’s rise to infamy, he attracted a biographer who worked fast to produce a book released this week, just three days before Santos was kicked out of Congress.On Friday, the author, Mark Chiusano, posted: “Definitely didn’t think I’d be writing a political obit[uary] for Santos … one year after he was elected, but here we are.” More

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      These Candidates Might Run to Replace George Santos

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      There were once no fewer than 20 candidates vying to challenge Representative George Santos in his re-election bid in Long Island and Queens. But if he is ousted, party leaders are expected to quickly winnow the field to just two who would face off in a special election early next year.New York State rules allow Democrats and Republicans to forgo messy primaries for special elections. The candidates will emerge instead from a mostly secretive backroom process led by the respective party chairmen in Queens and Nassau Counties.Here are the leading contenders.Democrats:Thomas R. Suozzi is widely seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. He held the seat before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a powerful fund-raiser, a committed centrist and perhaps the best-known candidate in either party. He is also close to leaders in New York and Washington who will pick the nominee, with the notable exception of Gov. Kathy Hochul, whom he tried to unseat.Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, has been a prolific fund-raiser and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. Ms. Kaplan, 58, fled Iran with her Jewish family as a teenager before entering politics. She flipped a State Senate seat to Democratic control in 2018, but lost it in the Republicans’ 2022 wave.Party officials might also consider Robert Zimmerman, a public relations executive who lost to Mr. Santos in 2022, and Austin Cheng, a health care executive who has never run for public office.Republicans:It is less clear whom Republicans might choose, but party officials said Mike Sapraicone was near the top of the list. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, is a former New York Police Department detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Both attributes could be helpful in a region where public safety has been a top electoral concern and TV ads are expensive.Mazi Pilip, a Nassau County legislator, has not declared her candidacy but is also said to be under consideration. Ms. Pilip is a rising star on Long Island with a remarkable biography: She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, served in the Israel Defense Forces and was elected to local office in New York in her 40s as a mother of seven. Like Mr. Sapraicone, she has relatively little political experience.Jack Martins would offer party leaders a more proven alternative. He has served two tours in the State Senate, has sharply criticized former President Donald J. Trump and knows how to connect with suburban voters. But Mr. Martins, 56, would have to give up a lucrative law partnership to serve in Congress, and has said little about his intentions.Other wild-card candidates include Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Jim Toes, a Manhasset financial services executive; and Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker who entered the race in April. More

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      House debates resolution to expel Republican George Santos – live updates

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      The House has started its resolution debate on expelling New York Republican representative George Santos.Santos has remained defiant and in denial of all charges against him, including wire fraud, arguing that his fellow lawmakers are “bullying” him out of the House.Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
      George Santos remained defiant ahead of the House expulsion vote. In a fiery press conference this morning on Capitol Hill, Santos accused the House ethics report which detailed “pervasive” fraud as “slanderous” and “littered in hyperbole, littered in opinion.”
      Anna Kaplan, a former Democratic New York state senator who is challenging George Santos for his House seat, has responded to the upcoming House expulsion vote surrounding Santos, saying: “If George Santos is expelled tomorrow, the special election will be right around the corner. I am battle tested, and I am ready to flip New York’s third congressional district blue. We’ve already raised over $1m. We’re just getting started.”
      New York Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman has released a statement in response to George Santos’s vows to introduce a privileged resolution to expel him today, saying: “No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former congressman George Santos seriously, This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics and outright fraud.”
      A New York appellate court reinstated a gag order on Thursday that prohibited Donald Trump and his lawyers from publicly commenting on court staff in the former president’s civil fraud case. “Petitioners having moved to stay enforcement of the aforesaid gag order and supplemental limited gag order pending hearing and determination of the instant petition. Now, upon reading and filing the papers with respect to the motion, and due deliberation having been had thereon, it is ordered that the motion is denied,” the court stated.
      Donald Trump continues to attack the wife of the New York state judge Arthur Engoron, who imposed a gag order on Trump in the former president’s civil fraud case in New York. In a series of posts on Truth Social, Trump has accused Dawn Engoron of posting anti-Trump memes on X, formerly known as Twitter. Dawn has said that the X account is not run by her.
      Donald Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise has condemned the reinstatement of the gag order, telling CBS: “In a country where the first amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial.”
      The Joe Biden administration has announced new action to protect communities from lead exposure. In a statement released on Thursday, the White House revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a proposal to “strengthen its lead and cooper rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years, helping secure safe drinking water for communities across the country.”
      A vote on Santos’s fate will take place tomorrow.Republican leaders delayed the vote, saying that they have other business to get to today. Tomorrow’s vote will be the third time this year that the chamber has considered expelling Santos.The debate has concluded.In a final defense, Santos remained defiant. He did not offer much defense of himself, but said he would not resign.“If tomorrow, when this vote is on the floor, it is in the conscience of all of my colleagues that they believe this is a correct thing to do, so be it. Take the vote. I am at peace,” he said.“I do not believe that the Long Island crew is acting in bad faith, just exceedingly bad judgement,” said the Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz.“Since the beginning of this Congress, there’s only two ways you get expelled. You get convicted of a crime or you participated in a civil war. Neither of those apply to George Santos and so I rise, not to defend George Santos, whoever he is, but to defend the very precedent that my colleagues are willing to shatter,” he added.“I’ve heard your argument. I feel your passion. I understand your position but you’re about to go too far. Just calm down and step back,” said the Louisiana Republican representative Clay Higgins as he addressed the House.“This is what I advise my colleagues on both sides of the aisle … We’re talking about the removal of a member of Congress. Are the American people to believe the opinions of congressmen is a higher standard than the delivered vote of the American people? Is a report from a committee a higher standard than the two-year election cycle as established by our founding fathers and enshrined in our constitution? Calm down,” said Higgins.The floor has been yielded back to George Santos who is now saying: “We hear a lot about process, we hear a lot about findings … this process has been skewed, how this process is sloppy.”He added that this process “is contradictory to the core”.The findings of the committee were shocking,” said the Republican representative Michael Guest of Mississippi.“We know that the ethics committee authorized 37 subpoenas. They issued 43 requests for information. They interviewed 40 witnesses. They reviewed 172,000 pages of documents and they issued a 56-page investigation report,” he said.“The report … paints a picture of the fraud committed by Santos,” he continued, pulling up a large display of the language used in the report.“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the display read, quoting from the report.“He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contribution to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit,” it added.“I’m not trying to be arrogant or spiteful or disrespectful of the [ethics] committee but I’m curious to know, what is the schedule of the ethics committee?” said Santos, complaining that other findings launched by the ethics committee have taken years.“Why rush this? To deliver a predetermined outcome sought out by some members of our conference? Or some members of this body?” he added.“It is a predetermined necessity for some members in this body to engage in this smear campaign to destroy me. I will not stand by quietly,” he continued.“Every member expelled in history of this institution has been convicted of crimes or confederate turncoats guilty of treason. Neither of those apply to me but here we are,” said George Santos in his House remarks.“On what basis does this body feel that that precedent must be changed for me?” he said.“I have been convicted of no crimes, Mr Speaker. My loyalty to this country … is true and unquestionable,” he added.The House has started its resolution debate on expelling New York Republican representative George Santos.Santos has remained defiant and in denial of all charges against him, including wire fraud, arguing that his fellow lawmakers are “bullying” him out of the House.The Joe Biden administration has announced new action to protect communities from lead exposure.In a statement released on Thursday, the White House revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a proposal to “strengthen its lead and cooper rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years, helping secure safe drinking water for communities across the country.”
      The president’s bipartisan infrastructure law invests over $50bn for the largest upgrade to the nation’s water infrastructure in history, and today’s action builds on these historic levels of funding from president Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics, to replace lead service lines across the nation,” the White House said.
      Joe Biden has once again reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to upholding protections surrounding reproductive healthcare.“Congress must codify the protections of Roe v Wade,” he tweeted on Thursday.Donald Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise has condemned the reinstatement of the gag order, telling CBS:“In a country where the first amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial.”Kise, who called today’s decision “a tragic day for the rule of law,” added: “Hard to imagine a more unfair process and hard to believe this is happening in America.” More

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      George Santos: a creature of Congress, Citizens United and limitless Republican hypocrisy | Sidney Blumenthal

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      It seems churlish for any member of the party of Donald Trump to single out George Santos for punishment as a liar, fraudster and fabulist. The 23 federal charges against the first-term member of Congress pale beside the Republican frontrunner’s 91 felony counts and civil suits over fraud and E Jean Carroll’s defamation claim, based on her allegation of rape. Republicans’ faux horror at the discovery of Santos’s extravagant spending of campaign funds on Botox, casino chips and OnlyFans porn belies their previous blithe tolerance of the red-dressed, gay-pride, Brazilian drag queen in their midst. Santos thrived as the symbol of the cultural contradictions of Republicanism. Did his sophisticated taste for accessories from Hermès and Ferragamo finally do him in with his anti-globalist colleagues?The facts of Santos’s false identity were pried apart gradually, beginning before he was even sworn in. Slowly, his crimes were revealed. Exposé after exposé – yet nothing happened. So long as Santos voted as a reliable Republican (100% Heritage Action rating), he was shielded from ritual rounds of queer bashing, much less expulsion. The narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives required every able-bodied member who could hold up an arm. Santos was straight as a party liner.Only when the stories of Santos’s lifetime of fraud became a rushing torrent did Kevin McCarthy, then speaker, refer the question to the ethics committee. There, it stayed bottled up. Republicans were always reluctant to excise Santos. His fate was entangled in the foul politics of the House.Only after McCarthy was deposed by an ultra-right cabal, and three prospective speakers chosen by a majority went down to defeat before Mike Johnson was elected, was an ethics report released and the expulsion of Santos brought up. It was a case of the first time as farce and the second, third and fourth times as farce, to be followed by the most comical farce of all.The day the Republican chair of the ethics committee introduced a motion to expel poor George, a leak from the forthcoming memoir of Liz Cheney – purged from her leadership post in the Republican conference in 2021, scourged for opposing Trump’s attempted overthrow of the US government, defeated in a vicious primary in 2022 – revealed that Santos was hardly among the most risible prevaricators in the House. McCarthy had explained to Cheney that he went on his humiliating visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago a mere three weeks after the January 6 insurrection out of pity, because he felt bad that Trump was “depressed”.“He’s not eating,” said McCarthy. This excuse from the supreme sycophant – “My Kevin,” Trump called him – was as likely as Trump not violating the constitution’s emoluments clause to enrich himself. The only plausible reason for Trump not eating would be because there was a double cheeseburger already lodged in his gullet.Then the Washington Post reported that several weeks after McCarthy’s fall, he had a troubling call with Trump, who informed him why he had been the not-so-hidden hand behind his ouster. McCarthy, Trump explained, had not expunged Trump’s two impeachments and endorsed him for 2024. McCarthy’s pilgrimage to Trump in early 2021, which made Trump’s revenge tour possible, had gained him no credit. As speaker, McCarthy had immense control over the spigot of Republican money and the influence that flows from it. If he had decided to ignore Trump’s threats and cut him off, Trump would have been severely disabled. But McCarthy revived the monster, so the monster in turn could strangle him. At long last, too late, McCarthy said to Trump: “Fuck you.”The newly installed speaker, Mike Johnson, declares himself divinely anointed. (Does that make Matt Gaetz the hand of God?) “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” he said, in his inaugural speech. Johnson extended his omniscience about the Lord’s blessing to every other member of the House. “He raised up each of you. All of us.” Presumably, the elect included Santos.When it came to a vote to expel Santos, Johnson recoiled. He had “real reservations”. He would not apply the whip. Members could “vote their conscience”. As for himself, he said he was “concerned about a precedent that may be set for that”. In 2022, Johnson sponsored the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, that would ban teaching “concepts like masturbation, pornography, sexual acts, and gender transition”, and prohibit “federal grants to host and promote sexually oriented events like drag queen story hours and burlesque shows”. Now, he would allow members to consider forgiveness for the sinner’s financial crimes, in “good faith”.Johnson might well cite Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye not be judged.” His own financial disclosure forms since he was a state legislator in Louisiana and as a member of the House are extraordinarily sketchy. He claimed he did not have a bank account. But as a legislator he had a contract to bill the state $400,000 to defend a law he sponsored to restrict abortion clinic access. In 2015 his financial disclosure form showed he cleared tens of thousands from religious right organizations: Freedom Guard, a legal operation; Living Waters Publications, a Christian publishing house that offered “biblical evangelism training camps”; Louisiana Right to Life; Louisiana Freedom Forum; and the Providence Classical Academy ($5,000-$24,999), “part-time”.The House ethics committee report on Santos buried within it a document compiled by his own campaign before the election in 2022 that detailed many lies and frauds later exposed. He and his campaign, as well as the National Republican Congressional Committee, were apparently all cognizant of the fraud from the start. Exhibit six of the ethics committee report consists of the 141-page “George Santos Vulnerability Report”, a point-by-point description of fake college degrees, Ponzi schemes, fraudster firms, scams, multiple civil judgments for cheating creditors, evictions and incident after incident of questionable behavior.The “vulnerability report” also chronicled Santos’s evolving story of his grandparents, from Belgian migrants who “fled the devastation of world war II Europe” into “Holocaust refugees”. This was the first falsehood about his background disclosed by the media, by CNN a week after his election. His fabrication of his identity, down to hiding his real given name (“George Devolder”) was an act of brazen and clumsy thievery he got away with to get into office with the aid of complicit campaign handlers.Santos’s conception, in a larger sense, came with the demise of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), commonly known as McCain-Feingold. Trashing that law created a world of dark money campaign contributions where almost anything goes. Santos’s spree was a byproduct of the post-campaign finance reform era. If he had only consulted an attorney to show him where the few remaining fine lines were, he could have gratified much of his urge for grift and glitz while avoiding indictment.Santos’s godparents in this respect were the Kentucky Republican senator Mitch McConnell, who worked for decades to torpedo reform, and the conservative justices of the supreme court, whose ruling sank McCain-Feingold. McConnell sought to forge a political empire built on unregulated corporate cash. He grasped that the keys to his kingdom would be held by the courts. So, as Senate majority leader, he frustrated reform legislation and packed the courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt took some doing but finally, in 2010, Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, struck down the crucial sections of the BCRA. Corporations now had the untrammeled right to spend as much as they wanted in campaigns and certain non-profit organizations did not have to disclose their donors. With a flourish of naive certainty, Kennedy stated: “Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.” The chief justice, John Roberts, echoed that view in his ruling in the 2022 case, SEC v Cruz, in which he decided that a candidate, here the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, could raise money after an election to pay campaign debts. With equally trusting innocence, Roberts wrote: “The government has not shown that [the law] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics.”The sluice gates of dark money opened. From the multibillion-dollar operation of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society to enact the conservative agenda through domination of the courts, the legal corruption trickled down. The gutting of the campaign finance law unleashed a frenzied atmosphere in which fraudsters like Santos could feel unrestrained. His wild ride was not directly related to the letter of the Citizens United decision, but to its reckless spirit.Then came Santos’s crash. Nobody offered more cogent analysis of his Republican colleagues’ sudden aversion to him than Santos himself.“I was, as we joke around a lot in my circles, we’re like, ‘Oh my God you were the ‘It Girl.’ Everybody wanted you.’ Until nobody wanted me.”He was stigmatized, as a sinner in a den of sinners. “Within the ranks of the United States Congress there’s felons galore,” he said. His casting out reminded him of a character from the Bible. “There’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds and all of a sudden George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress.” Reviled now as a prostitute, he has faith he will be canonized as a saint. Expulsion means never having to say you’re sorry.Expelling Santos cannot unwind that he was let into the House to witness what happened behind the scenes. His Republican colleagues, he said, are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw –and pretend like none of us know what’s going on”. He held a press conference to warn, “If the House wants to start different precedent and expel me, that is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body because this will haunt them in their future.”Perhaps George Santos has been divinely sent, a messenger to expose hypocrisy. God is not finished with him yet. We await the tell-all memoir and the Netflix series.
      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian columnist and author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      George Santos makes final effort to resist vote to expel him from US House

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      George Santos appealed to democratic norms on Thursday in a last-ditch effort to resist an expected vote to expel him from the US House of Representatives, describing efforts to remove him as “bullying” and warning that “the undoing of a lot of members of this body” would follow.The embattled Republican congressman, who is facing a third effort to expel him from Congress with a House vote due on Friday, told reporters outside the US Capitol in Washington DC that it was “an unfortunate circumstance to watch Congress waste the American people’s time over and over again on something that is in the power of the people, not the power of Congress”.Following a congressional ethics report that alleged Santos had used campaign funds for personal gain, including spending on Botox, OnlyFans, which is commonly used to procure pornography, and designer brands such as Hermès, Santos said the move to expel him on the basis of an ethics report was a rejection of precedent.The report, he argued, was “littered” with hyperbole and opinion. “No decent cop would bring this to a prosecutor or a DA and say here’s our report, go ahead and charge him.”Santos has already been charged with 23 federal counts including conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud.Only five members of Congress have previously been expelled. Santos said that lawmakers were “trying to join him to three Confederates and two people convicted in a court of law”.Santos went on to slam Congress as a “house that doesn’t work for the people” and accused some fellow Republican lawmakers as people “with rap sheets who think and feel emboldened enough to call out other people”.On Thursday, New York’s Staten Island representative, Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, told CNN: “The earth is round and George Santos should be expelled.”Republicans have a wafer-thin majority in the House, which will come under further pressure if Santos is expelled and a special election called in his New York district, which takes in a portion of New York City and Long Island.Malliotakis said of GOP control of the House: “Of course I’m concerned, but that should not be taken into account at the moment. The issue is, should this man be in Congress? He should not.” She further told CNN she thought due process, which some Republicans defending Santos’s place in Congress have said has not been sufficiently followed, had been fulfilled by the thorough ethics review in committee.But Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee, told the rightwing outlet Newsmax that he was against expulsion, arguing the issue was between Santos and voters in his district. “That’s how our system works,” Jordan said to Newsmax.Earlier, Santos also said he would introduce a privileged motion to expel Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic New York representative, over an incident in which he set off a fire alarm during a vote, which the House ethics committee had opted not to investigate.“No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former Congressman George Santos seriously. This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics, and outright fraud,” Bowman said in response.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told Axios on Thursday that a vote to expel Santos would now come on Friday. Santos has said that a vote today was “kind of not cool” since it was his second wedding anniversary.Johnson has said lawmakers should vote with their conscience, adding: “I, personally, have real reservations about doing this. I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that.”He continued: “I think [that] is the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote, and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.”Santos has previously described the effort to remove him as a “smear”. In a defiant speech on Tuesday, he hit back: “Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty and they are, in fact, guilty until proven innocent?”If the move to to expel him is successful, the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, will have to call a special election within 10 days of Santos’s expulsion. More

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      in Elections

      McCarthy Claimed Trump Was ‘Not Eating’ After Leaving Office, Cheney Says

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      In a new memoir, Liz Cheney wrote that Kevin McCarthy justified his trip to Mar-a-Lago by saying the former president was depressed after losing re-election.Former President Donald J. Trump was “really depressed” in the days after losing re-election and leaving office in January 2021, so much so that he was “not eating.”At least that is what Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney in trying to explain why he had traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, an act of solidarity that many have identified as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability.Mr. McCarthy, the California congressman who was then the House Republican leader, had condemned Mr. Trump for fueling the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol and even suggested that he resign, only to turn around and effectively absolve the former president by embracing him again. In her new book, Ms. Cheney, perhaps the country’s most vocal anti-Trump Republican, reports that Mr. McCarthy justified the Jan. 28 visit as an act of compassion for a beaten ally.Ms. Cheney wrote that she was so shocked when she first saw the photograph of Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump standing side by side with grins on their faces that she thought it was a fake. “Not even Kevin McCarthy could be this craven, I thought,” she wrote. “I was wrong.” She went to see Mr. McCarthy to confront him about rehabilitating the twice-impeached former president who had just tried to overturn an election he lost.“Mar-a-Lago?” she asked Mr. McCarthy, according to the book. “What the hell?”He tried to downplay the meeting, saying he had already been in Florida when Mr. Trump’s staff called. “They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy said by her account. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”“What?” she recalled replying. “You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?”“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” Mr. McCarthy said.Ms. Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, offers a scathing assessment of not only Mr. McCarthy but an array of Republicans who in her view subordinated their integrity to curry favor with Mr. Trump. Her account of his subjugation of the party presents a tapestry of hypocrisy, with inside-the-room scenes of Republicans privately scorning “the Orange Jesus,” as one wryly called him, while publicly doing his bidding.Ms. Cheney with Kevin McCarthy a few weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe much-anticipated memoir arrives on bookshelves even as Mr. Trump is in a commanding position to win next year’s Republican presidential nomination. Ms. Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress and led the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking member of her party, has assailed him as a budding autocrat in more visceral terms than most of his challengers for the nomination.The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a conservative star in her own right who was once on track to become House speaker, Ms. Cheney ultimately paid a price for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her service as vice chair of the House committee that investigated his role in instigating the Jan. 6 attack. She lost her leadership position and eventually her seat in a Republican primary last year. But she has vowed to do whatever she can to keep Mr. Trump from returning to the Oval Office.Indeed, she subtitled her book “A Memoir and a Warning” to make the point that Mr. Trump represents a clear and present danger to America if he is on the ballot next November. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she wrote. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”A re-elected Mr. Trump, she said, would face few checks on his power. “Step by step, Donald Trump would tear down the other structures that restrain an American president,” she wrote. “The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves,” she added, “is purely wishful thinking by people who prefer to look the other way.”Asked for comment on Wednesday, Mr. Trump, who has openly called for “termination” of the Constitution to immediately remove President Biden from office and reinstall himself without waiting for another election, did not directly address any of Ms. Cheney’s specific assertions but simply dismissed her as a disgruntled critic.“Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said by email. “These are nothing more than completely fabricated stories because President Trump is the clear front-runner to be the Republican nominee and the strongest candidate to beat Crooked Joe Biden.”Likewise, Mr. McCarthy did not deny anything in the book, copies of which have also been obtained by CNN and The Guardian. His office released a statement saying, “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now apparently it’s also McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”In Ms. Cheney’s telling, Mr. Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election even as he told the public that he had not — and she cited no less than Mr. McCarthy as a witness. Just two days after the November election, she said, Mr. McCarthy told her he had spoken to Mr. Trump. “He knows it’s over,” she quoted him saying. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.”That could in theory make Mr. McCarthy an important witness in the federal or state criminal cases against Mr. Trump, refuting any defense by the former president’s lawyers that he was acting on good-faith belief that fraud had stolen the election from him.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership after Mr. McCarthy’s support for Mr. Trump failed to save him from a right-wing rebellion.Mr. Johnson took the lead in trying to corral support for Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He sent an email to all House Republicans telling them that he had spoken with the president, who expected them to sign onto a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Mr. Johnson wrote.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMs. Cheney took that as a veiled threat and said she was surprised about Mr. Johnson, whom she had thought of as a friend. “He appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit,” she wrote. “When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal argument, Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”At first, Mr. McCarthy agreed with her that the pro-Trump brief went too far and told her he would not sign it because it would interfere with the power of states to run their own elections. “It federalizes too much,” he told her. But a day later, his name was added to the brief after all.Mr. Johnson did not back down even after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the case, sending Ms. Cheney a Fox News poll showing that 77 percent of Trump voters and 68 percent of Republicans believed the election had been stolen. “These numbers are big,” Mr. Johnson said, “and something we have to contend with as we thread the needle on messaging.”Ms. Cheney noted that Mr. Trump’s supporters believed the election was stolen because Republicans like Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Johnson were echoing his lies.Other Republicans were willing to toss aside traditions, norms and constitutional processes in the name of satisfying Mr. Trump’s desire to stay in power. When one Republican said during a meeting that they should not claim the election was rigged when there was no evidence, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies, said, “The only thing that matters is winning.”Likewise, she assailed Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, for seeking to set aside the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 while a commission investigated election results that had already been recounted and certified. “It was one of the worst cases of abandonment of duty for personal ambition I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Ms. Cheney wrote.In some cases, she found that Republicans stayed loyal to Mr. Trump out of outright fear. One colleague told her he was worried about the safety of his wife and baby if he spoke out.Behind the scenes, though, other Republicans cheered her on. After she was one of only 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, former President George W. Bush sent her a note. “Liz, Courage is in short supply these days,” he wrote. “Thank you for yours. You showed strong leadership and I’m not surprised. Lead on. 43.”Her vocal criticism of Mr. Trump grated on other Republicans, highlighting what she called their “cowardice” in the face of the former president. When she contradicted Mr. McCarthy on Mr. Trump’s future role in the party during a joint news conference, Mr. McCarthy complained to her privately afterward.“You’re killing me, Liz,” he said.“Kevin, this is about the Constitution,” she replied. “Think of what Trump did. Think how appalled any of our previous Republican leaders would be about this. How would Reagan have reacted to this? How would Bush have reacted? Think of my dad.”Mr. McCarthy dismissed that line of thinking. “This isn’t their party anymore,” he said.On that, she wrote, she had to agree. More

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      in US Politics

      George Santos to face expulsion vote on Thursday, House speaker says

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      The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New Yorker should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law.“What we’ve said as the leadership team is we’re going to allow people to vote their conscience,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.“I think it’s the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.“I personally have real reservations about doing this, I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that. So, everybody’s working through that and we’ll see how they vote tomorrow.”On Tuesday, Santos said he would not resign in order to avoid becoming only the sixth representative ever expelled from the House.“If I resign, I make it easy for this place,” Santos, 35, told reporters. “This place is run on hypocrisy. I’m done playing a part for the circus. If they want me to leave Congress, they’re going to have to take that tough vote.”But that tough vote was already drawing near.Earlier, two Democrats, Robert Garcia of California and Dan Goldman of New York, initiated proceedings to require an expulsion vote within two legislative days. Later, two Republicans, Anthony D’Esposito of New York and Michael Guest of Mississippi, did the same.“We want to make sure that happens this week,” Garcia said. “I think whatever it takes to get that vote this week is what we’re doing. He has no place in Congress.”The list of previous expellees includes three men who fought for the Confederacy in the civil war and two convicted of crimes. The last man forced out, James A Traficant of Ohio, a congressman with a famous “piled-high pompadour” toupée who was convicted of fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice and racketeering, was expelled in 2002.On Thursday, a two-thirds majority will be required to add Santos to the list of shame.Santos was elected last year but quickly saw his résumé torn to pieces by investigative reporting and past actions subjected to legal scrutiny. He admitted embellishing that résumé – which included bizarre claims about his academic and professional history – but denied wrongdoing. Among more picaresque episodes, he denied having been a drag performer in Brazil – a denial now undermined by reporters including the author of a new biography.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not yet stood trial. As indicated by Johnson on Wednesday, many in Congress, including senior Democrats, have cited the lack of a conviction when opposing previous attempts to expel Santos, saying to do so without the verdict of a court would set a dangerous precedent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat in the closely divided Senate, is under indictment for alleged corruption. He denies wrongdoing.In Santos’s case, his own party generated a previous attempt to expel him. But it took a damning House ethics committee report, issued this month and detailing the use of campaign funds for expenses including Botox treatment and luxury purchases, to change the political equation.Johnson must govern with a narrow and unruly majority. A Santos exit would eat into that margin but Johnson this week attempted to persuade Santos to quit before he could be thrown out.Santos has said he will not run again but his refusal to quit prompted an unnamed Republican to tell Axios he thought Santos wanted the “notoriety” of becoming the sixth person ever forcibly expelled.If Santos is removed, his New York district, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens, will have a special election within 90 days. More