You don’t have to approve of George Santos to understand it should have been left to his constituents in Long Island and Queens to decide on his suitability to remain in Congress.
Nonetheless, despite a slim majority in the House and crucial votes looming as they head into an election year, 105 Republicans were suckered by moral vanity into expelling one of their own Friday.
The 35-year-old gay son of Brazilian immigrants, Santos had the most conservative voting record of the entire New York delegation, and now he is gone, taking his vote with him.
“To hell with this place,” he said as he exited the US Capitol after the vote, vowing revenge on the former colleagues who had turned on him.
Perfect. Just what Republicans need: more friendly fire.
Who knows who will fill his place in the Democratic district he miraculously flipped last year?
Gov. Hochul has to hold a special election in the next couple of months, and you can bet that Democrats will use all their wiles to regain a seat that they used to take for granted.
Republicans’ own goal
Santos is facing multiple criminal charges for wire fraud, stealing public funds and lying on federal disclosure forms, and he already had declared he wouldn’t run for re-election, so there was no need for his colleagues to intervene and break precedent.
Get Miranda’s latest take
Sign up for Devine Online, the newsletter from Miranda Devine
They simply could have declared that he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, like all Americans, and quietly groomed his replacement.
That would have been the right thing to do, and it had the added advantage of being self-serving, because they could have hung on to their four-seat majority until the election.
Now their buffer is down to three, making recalcitrant RINOs more powerful.
It’s guaranteed that the bad press and criticism from Democrats about Santos would have accelerated, because the House majority is a crucial prize.
But who cares? That’s just situation normal.
If you are a Republican member of Congress capable of being shamed by Democrats or their media lapdogs, you need your head read.
You should be wearing their opprobrium as a badge of pride.
The fact is that Santos is a Walter Mitty character — just like the president.
Like Joe Biden, he is a compulsive liar who seems to live in a fantasy world of fake academic credentials, sporting accomplishments and invented family histories.
Like Biden, he craves the accoutrements of wealth.
House ethics investigators accused Santos of spending campaign money on Botox, OnlyFans, Ferragamo shoes and luxury hotels, causing Seth Meyers to quip: “He’s got the shopping list of a 98-year-old oil tycoon’s 20-year-old wife.” Boom boom.
Satirical web site The Babylon Bee captured the mood: “Santos Expelled By Congress For Doing Terrible Job Covering Up Ethics Violations.”
In reality, if you are going to start expelling members of Congress for lies and dishonesty, Democrats should lead the pack.
To name a few: serial liar Adam “Russia collusion” Schiff, Nancy “stock-picker” Pelosi, Eric “Fang Fang” Swalwell, who was seduced by a Chinese spy, and Jamaal “The Insurrectionist” Bowman, who pulled a fire alarm to delay a vote and lied about it.
Or how about New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in September over allegedly accepting bribes in exchange for exerting influence on behalf of Egypt, in his powerful role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee?
His wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, also was charged after an FBI raid of their home found $500,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and a safe, along with 13 gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz.
Double standards
“Whatever Mr. Santos did with Botox or OnlyFans is far less concerning to me than the indictment against Senator Menendez, who’s holding gold bars inscribed with Arabic on them from Egypt while he is still getting classified briefings today,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on the floor of the House, attempting to reason with his colleagues last week.
Yet Menendez retains his security clearance and attended a classified briefing on Ukraine earlier this month.
Even Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman was honest enough to point out the double standard.
“If you are going to expel Santos,” he told ABC’s The View, “how can you allow somebody like Menendez to remain?”
Santos’ lies by comparison “were almost, you know, funny, like he landed on the moon and that kind of stuff,” Fetterman said, whereas Menendez has “actually done much more sinister kinds of things. . . . Menendez, I think, is really a senator for Egypt.”
That’s the simple truth, and now Republicans have lowered the bar for expulsion in a way that you just know Democrats will use against them at the first opportunity.
Laughing off Dem defense
Rep. Dan Goldman beclowned himself last week when he tried to mount the case at a hearing into Big Tech censorship that Hunter Biden’s laptop was concocted by the Russians, or by Rudy Giuliani, or a combination of the two.
The president’s congressional coverup artist ran headlong into the buzz saw of witness Michael Shellenberger’s mocking disbelief.
“Are you suggesting that the New York Post participated in a conspiracy to construct the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop?” Shellenberger asked.
“No, sir. The problem is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia,” replied Goldman.
“What’s the evidence that that happened?” asked Shellenberger.
“There is evidence of it, but the point is it’s not the same thing,” Goldman said, belatedly realizing the hole he had dug himself.
“So, you’re engaging in a conspiracy theory,” Shellenberger said, as everyone laughed.
Goldman was just parroting the narrative that the White House, the Democratic Party, Hunter Biden and his pricey lawyers have decided to defend.
We’re supposed to suspend reality and take the word of the Bidens when they pretend that the laptop is not real, that Hunter “did nothing wrong,” that Joe didn’t lie when he said he never talked to his son about business, or when he said that Hunter never made a penny from China, or that he had nothing to do with his family’s influence-peddling schemes.
In fact, the president deserves an A grade, according to California snake oil salesman Gavin Newsom: “It’s been a master class, there’s simply no administration in my lifetime that’s been more effective producing more substantive results.”
Gaslighting is all they have. Oversight Chairman James Comer is coming at them like a freight train, with more damning financial evidence to come this week and a vote to formalize the impeachment inquiry expected to pass the House before Christmas, as Republicans unite.
“A great thing happened during Thanksgiving,” Comer told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “The members went home and . . . heard from their constituents, ‘Yes, we want you to move forward.’ ”
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/12/03/opinion/republicans-suckered-into-expelling-george-santos-and-the-most-conservative-voting-record-in-ny/