Patrick Semansky / AP, file
Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., departs Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023.
Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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George Santos’ long and twisted string of lies, deceptions, misrepresentations and narcissistic self-grandeur should have been enough to get him removed from his seat in the House of Representatives. After all, the Republican from New York didn’t accidentally misspeak. He wasn’t taken out of context. He didn’t even “exaggerate” his résumé. He blatantly and repeatedly lied about every element of his background, experience and education.
Santos not only didn’t graduate from either of the two colleges he once claimed to hold degrees from, he never attended them. He not only wasn’t praised by his supervisors at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, he never worked for them in the first place. Nor did his mother die as a result of being in the World Trade Center on 9/11, as he claimed. She wasn’t even in the country that day. And despite his desire to win the votes of a district with a large Jewish population, he wasn’t the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
The latter two claims are particularly vile, as they seek to manipulate and prey upon the emotions of the descendants and survivors of tragedy.
Moreover, he’s a Republican, a member of the self-described party of personal responsibility. The party that professed to believe in integrity until Donald Trump came along. Yet GOP leaders seem perfectly content to allow Santos to occupy a seat in Congress he effectively stole from voters through his lies. Their anti-democracy calculus is simple: better to have another liar and a cheat in their caucus than to expel Santos and risk that the voters of New York might pick a Democrat in a special election.
Clearly, Santos isn’t the only one lying to the American people about who they are and what they stand for.
What’s worse, most of the GOP isn’t even pretending to be concerned about Santos’ conduct. Rather than removing Santos from Congress or sidelining him by withholding committee assignments, GOP leadership has instead recommended that he serve on the Small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee.
Think about that. The leadership of the Republican Party nominated a man with no scientific background and a demonstrated opportunist with obviously corrupt instincts to participate in national policy decisions on science, space and technology. They want that same man, an accused financial criminal, to make policy decisions governing good, honest and hard-working small-business owners. What could possibly go wrong?
While taxpayers are justifiably concerned about fraud and abuse in the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program, Republican House leadership wants to hand oversight of that same program over to a man credibly accused of check fraud.
Simultaneously, they’re giving Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a known conspiracy theorist, a seat on the Homeland Security Committee. Never mind that Greene’s beliefs about national security have been heavily informed by QAnon lunatics and include claims that a group of Jewish bankers used space lasers to start wildfires in California.
Yes. She actually made that accusation.
She also falsely claimed that mass shootings of children and families at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Parkland High School and at an Independence Day parade in Illinois were “false flag operations” carried out by gun control advocates.
And perhaps most disturbing for someone sitting on the Homeland Security Committee are Greene’s claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job of the U.S. government.
From Greene’s perspective, the appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks would have been to let Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida carry on as usual — which is at least ideologically consistent, since she has also argued in favor of letting Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin run roughshod over Ukraine.
These are not isolated incidents from a couple of individual whack-a-doodles who stumbled into Congress. This is the current state of the GOP.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., claimed that Greenland being covered in ice proves that the world is getting cooler, not warmer, leading the three-term senator to oppose almost all climate change legislation.
Today’s GOP Congress is marbled with anti-democracy election deniers.
And more than a dozen Republican members of Congress have made public statements openly supporting the idea that Jewish Americans are intentionally bringing Black and brown people into the United States to replace white people. That’s a conspiracy that sounds awfully similar to the rhetoric of Nazis and the KKK. Vile ideas like these were also behind the deadly white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, the Pittsburgh synagogue mass murder and the stunning rise in antisemitism across America.
The same people chanting “Jews will not replace us” are in Congress now. And they’ve got the numbers to hold more moderate Republicans — and thus the American people — hostage to their delusions.
We don’t believe that all Republicans are liars, cheaters, conspiracy theorists or violent white supremacists. But that faction of the party is growing rather than declining. Arguably, poll numbers suggest that it is now the majority of the GOP and that traditional Republicans are in the minority of their party. As we saw during this month’s House speaker vote, the insurrectionists have enough power that the rest of the party must bend to their will. Rational Republicans are being forced to accept having people like Santos and Greene in positions of power or run the risk of having a noose hung outside the Capitol with their name on it.
As the previous two elections have shown, traditional conservatives cannot save their party from within. The number of blatant liars, cheaters, violent extremists and conspiracy theorists elected to the GOP ranks is growing. Their power and influence over the party is now intractable. Simultaneously, there is a dwindling number of traditional conservatives like Liz Cheney and John McCain — people who believed in and protected the integrity of our system of government rather than taking hostages and tearing America apart.
The only hope traditional conservatives have is to take their money, their time and their votes elsewhere. We’re not suggesting they become Democrats. We recognize that such a proposal would be a bridge too far. But they should leave the party and become independents or create a new party. They should send a clear message that they will no longer be complicit in the exact type of government they claim to abhor.
