By a vote of 311 to 114, Republican New York Rep. George Santos has been expelled from Congress days after declaring that it was time for his colleagues to “put up or shut up” regarding his continued presence in the chamber. (A two-thirds majority, or 290 votes, was required.)
Santos was elected to Congress to represent a Long Island–based district in 2022 amid a wave of anti-Biden backlash in the Empire State, portraying himself during the campaign as a socially progressive finance industry professional who would attack the issues of inflation and crime. Shortly after he won, a New York Times exposé triggered a deluge of reporting which revealed that he had lied, during the race, about a vast number of biographical details, including but not limited to those related to his professional background, his level of personal wealth, whether his grandparents were Jewish and had fled the Holocaust, whether his mother nearly died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and whether he was a star volleyball player at New York City’s Baruch College. (He isn’t Jewish and didn’t attend Baruch College, and in September 2001 his mother was living in Brazil.)
As personally damning as all of this was, however, the bipartisan movement to expel him was more directly related to criminal allegations, for which Santos is scheduled to stand trial next fall, that he embezzled campaign funds and submitted fraudulent campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission. While he has pleaded not guilty to those charges, he was also the subject of a related House Ethics Committee investigation which concluded, in a report released in November, that he did in fact put campaign money toward personal uses including Botox and the OnlyFans platform.
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Read MoreAfter the release of the report, the resolution to expel Santos gained support from a number of representatives of both parties who had previously said that they were hesitant to set a precedent by removing a member before the formal investigations into their conduct had concluded. Santos, committed to the end to the cause of creating viral content, complained on a live social media event that it was “kind of not cool” to expel him on his two-year wedding anniversary, announced at a Thursday press conference that he would be filing “a slew of complaints” against other members in the time before his expulsion vote, and described the actions against him as “bullying.”
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementIn the near term, Santos’ expulsion reduces the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to eight members; his seat will be filled by a special election that should take place in February, a race that the Cook Political Report rates as a toss-up. In the long term, a determinative number of senators are still committed to filibuster rules that largely prevent that body from passing legislation, while the House is increasingly occupied by Republicans who have far more incentive to raise their personal profiles by engaging in catty, disruptive melodrama than by participating in actual government. (This is something Santos, who is nothing if not perceptive about where bread is buttered, seemed to realize immediately upon taking office.) Which is to say: While his own tenure in Washington may be ending, the George Santos Era—of a Congress dominated by winking, celebrity-styled performative dysfunction—may just be getting started.
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