If that’s the reasoning I still think it’s a really terrible idea. If the Republicans decide it’s worthwhile trying to expel a Democratic member of congress I don’t think the fact that 30 Democrats came to Santos’ rescue when his own party was willing to cut him loose is going to give those Republicans any pause whatsoever.
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I agree, but I also understand it. 
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Wouldn’t want to break precedent, no sirree. I believe that according to precedent, the method for Democrats to remove Republicans from Congress was demonstrated by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856.
It didn’t really stick though.
Congress is not a courtroom
Whatever makes it clear that Santos violated the public trust is all the process that is due
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For good and for ill, the process to successfully expel a member requires a 2/3 majority, so unless one party does extraordinarily well in a future election it can only ever pass with bipartisan support. Democrats wouldn’t need any Republican help to prevent expulsion of one of their House members unless a lot of Democrats were voting for expulsion too.
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Congress is not a courtroom
porter did say she’d have been willing to censure him, and she says she’s open to kicking him without him being found guilty in a court – so long as the investigation completes first.
The gravity of expulsion demands due process—by the Ethics Committee, our courts, or another impartial fact finder.
i personally suspect that the focus on process was to keep expulsion off the table for tlaib – because it’s totally possible there’d be both dem and gop support for that. but it’s unlikely anyone would go on record with that reasoning.
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“PS It’s not shameful to resign”
10/10, no notes.
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Expelling a House representative requires a 2/3rds vote to approve in the whole House, though.
The last time that either party had a supermajority like that was the 95th Congress in 1977-1979.
Gerrymandering and strucutral advantages for the R caucus aside the country is at a more even balance between the parties than that and will be for the foreseeable future.
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My 2c is that the fact there was neither a completed criminal trial nor an ethics committee report is a decent hatrack on which to hang a “no” vote. Strategically I think it’s better to have Santos either still in the seat or very little removed from his time in it next November. It might be a harder “no” vote to take if it didn’t dovetail strategically with winning seats back (certainly Santos’s district, maybe more.)
But that is exactly the kind of thing that has cultivated so much public cynicism about Congress: basing the application of checks and balances on strategic partisan calculations instead of simply removing a clearly unfit member because it is the right thing to do.
I mean, politics ain’t beanbag as the saying goes.
There’ve been swing districts where Democratic-aligned donors have given money to the more-extreme Republican primary candidates with the goal of elevating them just as far as the general where they are more likely to lose than a less-extremist R candidate. It’s a little distasteful to me, yeah, but I’d rather this happen than have the seat on the red side. Recent cases of this haven’t backfired as far as I’ve heard.
“We’re going to hold back on using the safeguards designed to remove grossly unfit politicians until the timing brings maximum benefit to our party” does have a corrosive effect on our country though. As it is something like 40% of Americans think Trump was twice impeached because Democrats wanted to hurt the Republicans, not because Democrats were fulfilling their Constitutional duty. This kind of thing just reinforces that cynicism.
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