What Happened to Dealing With George Santos Quickly?

After he was elected, America soon learned George Santos was at best a serial fabulist—and at worst a criminal fraudster and con man. He was not from a family of Holocaust survivors (he wasn’t even Jewish), his mother wasn’t a 9/11 victim (it’s not even clear she was in the United States at the time), and he wasn’t a highly-educated Wall Street tycoon. Santos had lied about almost everything; where he went to high school and college, where he worked, about funding an animal charity, and where his money came from. The Washington Post called the scope of Santos’s lies “breathtaking.” In May, he was criminally charged on 13 counts; the federal indictment included charges of fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making false statements (Santos pleaded not guilty to all charges). A week after Santos was charged, a Democratic effort to expel him from the House faltered. Instead, Republicans punted to the House Ethics Committee, where they claimed Santos would be dealt with swiftly.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy—a man who went down to Mar-a-Lago a mere 22 days after Trump tried to prevent the certification of the 2020 election—said “we can look at this very quickly and come to a conclusion on what George Santos did and did not do through ethics, a safe bipartisan committee. I would like the Ethics Committee to move rapidly on this.” New York Republicans, many of whom supported expelling Santos outright, assured the same. “I firmly believe this is the quickest way of ridding the House of Representatives of this scourge on government,” Representative Anthony D’Esposito said at the time. “While I would have preferred there to be enough votes to expel the sociopath scam artist, Congressman D’Esposito has spearheaded the next best option: To refer this matter to the Ethics Committee where we expect a result within 60 days and for the terrible liar to be gone, by resignation or expulsion, before August recess,” fellow New York Republican representative Nick LaLota said.

Well, it’s now half way through said August recess, and Santos appears to have only faded into the background; he’s still in his congressional seat, tweeting about the Biden family (claiming he knows the “players” and “sources” behind some undefined Hunter Biden smoking gun), shit-talking Michael Cohen, and complaining about mean people on Twitter (“I believe in Karma,” Santos tweeted). Of course, the words “ethics committee” and “move rapidly” do not really belong in the same sentence and perhaps we all knew deep down that this call for a rapid ethics investigation was merely a stalling tactic. After all, unlike the Office of Congressional Ethics, which has a fixed time frame for investigations, the House Ethics committee does not, and their probes can drag out for months. It’s possible Santos won’t actually be dealt with in the House until around or after the 2024 election.

And sitting House Republicans don’t appear to be actively campaigning against the guy. Sure, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be getting any help from his party; Santos was notably left out of the Protect the House New York 2024 joint fundraising committee that includes McCarthy and his leadership PAC, the national campaign arm for House Republicans, and New York state Republicans’ federal PAC, per Politico. A slate of former Republican lawmakers are holding a fundraiser for Santos’s primary challenger, Kellen Curry, and McCarthy is fundraising for other New York Republicans. But sitting Republicans don’t seem interested in raising hell about Santos anymore.

There are a couple explanations for this. First, the Republican party was always heading here. Donald Trump lied about building the wall so that Marjorie Taylor Greene could QAnon and so that Santos could make up his entire resumé. But more importantly, as much as Santos is a problem for Republicans, not having Santos’s vote could be even more of a problem. McCarthy, whose tenuous path to the speakership is emblematic of just how razor thin the Republican majority is, desperately needs almost every vote in his caucus. After all, to gain the gavel, McCarthy agreed to a one-person threshold for a motion to vacate the speaker. Santos, just like everyone else in that caucus, has that power. If he resigns, he is leaving a competitive seat open to a special election.

But unfortunately for Republicans, Santos staying in the seat in the short term could very well bite them in a year’s time. New York Republicans nearly swept the tossup races in the 2022 midterms, playing a major role in clinching the House majority. But that also means five other Republican congressmen from the New York delegation now occupy swingy purple seats in districts that Joe Biden won or nearly won. Covering for Santos won’t do them any good. LaLota won by about 35,000 votes. D’Esposito won by about 10,000 votes. Republican Mike Lawler won by about 2,000 votes, Marc Molinaro won by about 6,000 votes, and Brandon Williams won by about 3,000 votes. Not that long ago all of them were going scorched earth against Santos—that is until House Republicans side-stepped an up-down vote on whether Santos should keep his seat.

In the end, Republicans may not have the final word on Santos. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance pointed out the DOJ’s case “takes precedence” over the Ethics Committees work. “The Santos prosecution will go forward on schedule. There will be no ignoring that.”

In other words, Republicans may not be able to avoid their Santos problem much longer.