On Friday, the US House voted to expel Republican Rep. George Santos by a vote of 311 to 114 (with two voting “present”). The expulsion, an exceedingly rare outcome in Congress, marked an end to a nearly yearlong saga for the embattled Santos, whose litany of misdeeds include alleged campaign finance fraud, identity theft and credit fraud charges, and lying about virtually every aspect of his resume and background.
It’s been a wild ride. Santos’s fabrications began coming to light almost immediately after he was elected last year, including falsifying a family real estate fortune, claiming to run an animal charity, falsely claiming Jewish heritage, and alleging that his mother was a 9/11 survivor. And we still haven’t figured out whose baby this is!
That Santos continued to remain a US representative until today is a testament to the Republicans’ willingness to protect its meager hold on the House, no matter how embarrassing and/or fraudulent the makeup. Even in the hours leading up to the vote, House GOP leadership, including Speaker Mike Johnson, advocated for voting against expulsion, though they didn’t whip up the votes to save him.
The GOP’s four-seat majority — and the unprecedented power it’s given the party’s most radical faction — has already cost one Speaker of the House his job and created a whole lot of chaos. The Santos shenanigans are just one more symptom of the government’s increasingly incapable right wing. So how did we get here? Let’s back up.
When Santos was elected to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District in the 2022 midterm elections, he was touted as a major GOP success story. Santos beat challenger Robert Zimmerman to flip a seat that was held by Democrats for 10 years. As a 34-year-old Latino, the child of Brazilian immigrants who had allegedly built a Wall Street and real estate fortune, and the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress, he pitched himself as the embodiment of the American dream, making him a shoe-in for GOP'ers looking to expand their base.
And yet, Santos’s image started unraveling even before he got to Washington. In December 2022, nearly a month before he was sworn into Congress, the New York Times published an explosive report revealing that Santos misrepresented much of his resume, including that there were no records of him graduating from Baruch College or working at Goldman Sachs or being a landlord with 13 properties, and that he appeared to have fabricated a story about four of his employees dying at the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. Just to name a few.
From there, things kept getting worse for Santos. Shortly after the initial report came out, the Times further reported that Santos had a history of racking up unpaid loans and rent; the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York launched an investigation into his finances, and the Nassau County District Attorney’s office started looking into his many, many lies.
Democrats and some Republicans in Congress urged Santos to resign and called for his expulsion. He was accused of allegedly setting up a GoFundMe to raise money for a disabled veteran’s dog, then stealing the $3K he raised (the dog died). And that was before more of his campaign finance problems came to light, including unaccounted campaign spending.
Santos admitted to fabricating some of his personal history and to experiencing occasional money problems, but refused to step down, even as the charges against him mounted. In May, he was arrested for a litany of alleged crimes that included spending thousands of campaign dollars on luxury clothing and personal credit card payments, lying to receive New York State unemployment benefits, and falsifying his financial disclosure statements. And in October, he was hit with even more charges, including stealing the identities of his donors and making personal payments using their credit cards, and telling the Federal Elections Committee that he made a $500,000 personal loan to his campaign when he had less than $8K in the bank. (Santos has denied wrongdoing.)
Somehow, all of this wasn’t quite enough to oust Santos, who survived not one, but two Congressional expulsion attempts. But the tide turned against him more strongly after the House Ethics Committee released a report earlier this month outlining a truly wild number of alleged misdeeds, including that Santos spent campaign funds on Botox, spa services, Sephora splurges, and OnlyFans subscriptions.
Santos’s fellow New York Republicans have been leading the newest charge against him, likely to save their own skins; some of them also flipped seats in 2022, and face uphill battles in their home districts.
Not that Santos hasn't had some defenders. Leadership like Johnson and House Republican Conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) stood by Santos, and far-right House members reportedly voted to save him. On Thursday, Rep. Matt Gaetz spoke passionately in Santos’s defense, arguing, “Whatever Mr. Santos did with Botox or OnlyFans is less concerning to me than the indictment against [Democratic senator Bob Menendez], who is holding gold bars inscribed with Arabic on them from Egypt while he’s still getting classified briefings today.”
It should be noted that Santos has not been convicted of any crimes, and arguments for his expulsion focus on the deep shame he has brought upon the House (as if the House hasn’t brought plenty of shame upon itself). That Santos has been allowed to stay in Congress despite, well, everything, is mostly indicative of the fact that there’s been too much disorder in the House this year to even stay focused on him. That Republicans voted in favor of his expulsion now just goes to show that Santos’s misdeeds are at last too flagrant, too public, and too close to the next election for them to look away, since keeping him in office now risks losing that seat to a Democrat in 2024.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed this in a press conference on Thursday: “George Santos is a national embarrassment," he said, "but clearly an embarrassment to New York Republicans.” Jeffries specifically called out Rep. Stefanik, who “bragged publicly about the significant amounts of money that were raised by her and New York Republicans in order to elect a serial fraudster.”
He added, “It’s going to be up to Democrats to now clean up the mess in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.”
Santos’s expulsion doesn’t actually save this House, which is still a huge mess, now under the leadership of an antiabortion, antiseparation of church-and-state speaker who was barely vetted by the party that voted him in and suggested he was ordained by God. It has little bearing on, say, whether or not ongoing House budget squabbles force a government shutdown in January or stopgap measures kick the can down the road again (and again and again). It will not really fix anything.
But without Santos, the House will be slightly less of a media circus…slightly.
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