Originally published at: Santos "cannot be trusted" – new report
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56 pages? I could have written one word: Liar.
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Is this good enough for Democrats (and some Republicans < chuckle >) to expel him. Or is that word possible still a sticking point?
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Now can congress finally kick his ass out or are there still going to be a bunch of hand-wringers in both parties going on about “due process?”
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Maybe somebody can change the locks so when he comes back after the T-Giving break he can’t get back into his office?
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And they couldn’t delay the expulsion vote by just two weeks, so that representatives could have considered what the report contained before they cast their vote on whether to expel him or not?
That seems at best inefficient, at worst actually suspicious.
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The fact that he spent the GOP’s money on gay porn…
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Now they’re going to rehold the vote to expel, and they’re going to do the right thing and expel him (looking at you House Dems that voted to not expel him), right? Right?!?!?!
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The fig leaf the Democrats who didn’t vote to expel was that they wanted to give him the benefit of “due process.”
OK, so he’s had due process of the Ethics Committee investigation. Nothing in the Constitution requires a criminal conviction to expel, the House is free to expel for any reason it wants to under the Constitution. The actual language is:
Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.
So go ahead Members, show us you can do the right thing, because Santos sure isn’t going to do the right thing and resign in shame.
Edit: misspelled that moron’s name
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Yet Congress refuses to oust Santos out of fear of setting a real precedent of enforcing ethics.
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Probably every Republican legislator in Congress and most of the state legislatures are concealing crimes of their own – either financial, sexual, or insurrectionist. That’s why they’re so eager to excuse him.
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If they decided it took repeating “liar” for 56 pages to really drive home the magnitude of it, though, I guess I can’t disagree.
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One glimmer of hope is that the Republican head of the ethics committee (who voted “present” on the last expulsion attempt) announced that he’ll be introducing a new expulsion resolution, so that’s at least one more vote than last time and takes away some of the political cover for anyone saying that they were just wanting to see the results of the committee’s report first.
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They rushed the vote before the report specifically to devalue the report. An ethics report with all the details is way less exciting and less urgency to even complete if the person is no longer a member of congress. Doing it before the report, would have also legitimized expulsion votes when people “just know” someone should be expelled, even if an investigation isn’t done. A tool the GOP would be very willing to repeat.
It was all upside for the GOP to expel him prior to the report.
I expect there will be many votes that change. Probably every Dem vote will be for expulsion.
This assumes the GOP allows it to go to a vote and doesn’t just accept that he will not run again as good enough.
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If he had been expelled, this report would be moot, and possibly blocked frrom release on those grounds… Letting him stay on until the report was finished increases the pain.
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Expulsion from congress does not and should not require the same standards of evidence and due process as a criminal trial. There was more than enough publicly known about George Santos before the investigation for any reasonable person to conclude that he was not fit to serve in congress.
The things he publicly admitted to should have been disqualifying on their own.
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I don’t think the ethics report meets those standards. Even when they send it to the justice department, then the justice department will do an investigation to those standards.
I would say all of that should have made the ethics investigation and report faster then. They could/should have been done in a few days just writing it all down with verified sources and putting it into the record instead of just what was in media reports. That it took them as long as it did to create the report is the bigger mystery. That it took them a long time to even start is less of mystery.
I don’t remember any of the Dem votes to not expel being because they thought he didn’t deserve expulsion. I thought all of them just wanted an actual report detailing out all the reasons.
There’s lots of congressional rules that I disagree with. Wanting verified data in the record instead of just “the NY Times says” seems reasonable. Otherwise, we’re headed down the path of “The Babylon Bee says” being enough reason to expel someone.
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The more criminal/disqualifying behavior an individual has committed, the longer it takes to conduct an exhaustive report of their criminal/disqualifying behavior. So the worse the offender, the longer he gets to stay in Congress?
There were plenty of verified findings about Santos on record when his expulsion came up for a vote. It wasn’t just rumor.
At any rate, it takes a supermajority to expel a member of Congress so we aren’t exactly on the cusp of a situation where members are about to get tossed out willy-nilly. A lot of members of a congressperson’s own party would have to agree they were unfit to serve.
Came here for this! I have zero problems with republican donations being spent on OF.
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For the sake of argument, let’s say there is a successful motion to expel Santos and NY-3 finds itself vacant before the end of the year. Is there a special election to find a replacement to serve out the rest of his term, or does he Governor of NY simply appoint someone to serve the final year? If it’s an appointment, is the Gov under any obligation to appoint a Republican, especially considering that Santos’ campaign was fraudulent?
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