You’ll Have To Drag George Santos Out Of Congress Bracelets First

It’s time for your daily check-in with Astronaut Fireman Financier George Santos, the nation’s first Native American-Jewish Congressman. Oh, it’s funny ’cause it’s … not true. Well, except the part about him being a congressman, that’s totally true, much as Rep. Kevin McCarthy might wish it were otherwise.

Literally every day, another pile of Santos’s lies gets revealed. Check out his fellow Nassau County Republicans having a chortle over the egregious whopper that the congressman was a striker on the Baruch College volleyball team, leading the Bearcats to a league championship.

On a resume he submitted to the local GOP, which was published yesterday by the New York Times, Santos claimed to have graduated summa cum laude from Baruch, where he was renown for his athletic prowess; received an MBA from NYU; and worked at Goldman Sachs. None of that was true, as the members of the local committee could have discovered in five minutes if they’d bothered to verify it. So, these guys can laugh at Santos’s chutzpah, but it’s a lot easier to fake it ’til you make it if no one ever bothers to do a rudimentary Google search.

At this point, it’s clear that the law is going to catch up with this dipshit, and probably sooner rather than later. Yesterday, the Daily Beast reported on what appear to be donations to Santos’s campaign from “an Italian national and confessed smuggler of undocumented immigrants—who also happens to be the blood relative of some of his closest local supporters and campaign vendors.” Campaign finance law is a hot, hot mess — thanks, Chief Justice John Roberts! — but one of the things the FEC does tend to get testy about is donations from foreign nationals.

And this morning the Times has a story about a Santos PAC that was apparently not a PAC at all. Santos’s campaign appears to have solicited a $25,000 donation to what it described as an “independent expenditure group,” i.e. a super PAC, called RedStone Strategies. No such PAC is registered with the FEC, although Santos does have connections to RedStone Strategies, LLC, a political marketing company in Florida.

If the feds don’t get him, the Nassau County District Attorney will. Or maybe the Brazilian police will come and arrest him — they can swing through Orlando and pick up Bolsonaro on the way home. But some sort of way, this guy’s gonna get got sooner rather than later. We’re venturing into man-bites-dog territory here — wake us up when something that guy did turns out to be true and legal.

But from a political perspective, Santos is a giant albatross around Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s neck. At the very moment he’s excluding Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff from committee assignments, flogging blatant lies about an inability to get a security clearance in the private sector, McCarthy’s letting a pathological liar who’s under investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies participate as full member of the caucus. On Wednesday, McCarthy said that he wouldn’t let Santos sit on any “A” committees, such as Judiciary or Ways and Means, although, as Politico points out, those plum spots wouldn’t go to a freshman lawmaker anyway.

“The voters elected him to serve,” McCarthy insisted, appearing content to keep Santos voting Republican indefinitely because “the voters can make another decision in two years.”

New York Republicans, however, have a different plan. Having made major inroads with their state’s voters, they seem strongly disinclined to let this guy be the public face of their state party through 2024. At a press conference yesterday, Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito called for Santos to resign, calling on “other representatives in the House of Representatives to join me in rejecting him.” And shortly afterward, Reps. Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, and Brandon Williams took him up on the request.

As for Santos, he shows no inclination to relinquish his position. This morning he said he’d leave if 142 people requested his resignation, although later he clarified the number was 142,000, roughly the number who voted him into office, and blamed the elevator for muffling his words. So, unless and until men show up with shiny bracelets for this guy, we’ll be enjoying primo content like this for the foreseeable future.

Stumbling into his office thanks to a clumsily placed newspaper on the floor — there could not be a more apt metaphor than that.

[NYT / Daily Beast / NYT / Politico / NYT]

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