By Chris Satullo
You have to give George Santos this: Every new episode of his hit CSPAN miniseries, Not So Pretty Little Liar, packs a wallop.
Just when you think this endlessly inventive fellow must have run out of petty prevarications, he tops himself. Just this week, we learned from a Long Island Republican leader that Santos claimed to have been a star player on a championship volleyball team at Baruch College, a place where he said he’d earned a degree but which he never attended.
I was a little disappointed to learn, though, that Santos did tell the truth about one thing: Baruch actually does have a volleyball team.
Here’s another big development from this week’s episode: Four Republican congressmen from New York called upon Santos to resign, as did the Nassau County Republican chairman who favored us with the volleyball tidbit.
Santos, though, still refuses to resign the congressional seat he won last fall thanks to his cascade of lies about his resume. In one TV interview he did suggest he would relinquish the seat if “142 people” asked him to. Just when I was about to shout, “Consider it done!”, Santos clarified that he meant the 142 thousand people he duped into voting for him.
Give it time, George, give it time.
The week’s biggest development, perhaps, was the emerging evidence that something deeply funky was going on with how the Santos campaign raised cash, through a shady superPAC that made a number of rookie errors in potential violation of federal campaign law. If anything is going to drive this liar from Congress, those are it.
It sure won’t be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Here’s the main thing our Kevin knows about Santos: Georgie Boy was one of the reliable yes votes who last weekend helped the battered hollow man from California finally seize hold of his “Precious,” the speaker’s gavel.
So the Speaker is reduced to muttering inane excuses about “innocent until proven guilty,” as though we need a full-dress jury trial to verify that Santos spouts lies like the Trevi Fountain spurts water.
You see, McCarthy knows that, if a special election had to be held to replace Santos, it’s unlikely that voters in New York’s purple 3rd District would smile upon the party that put this unvetted fabulist onto last fall’s ballot. The seat would likely turn blue, and McCarthy’s thin majority, full of characters who would fit right in at the Star Wars cantina, would become even weaker.
So, yes, I concede it’s somewhat refreshing that a few elected Republicans and local party officials are willing to say the obvious thing out loud: This liar doesn’t deserve a seat in Congress. (Though I wonder whether they would be so bold if they weren’t secure in the knowledge that McCarthy and the rest of the House leadership will do nothing in response.)
Until Santos no longer sits in his backbench seat, grim-faced in a periwinkle vest, color me unimpressed.
A bigger point lurks. As plentiful and various as Santos’ falsehoods are, in the larger scheme of American politics right now, they still count as “little lies.” Yes, they helped elect a deeply flawed man to a post he in no way deserves. But even if McCarthy were to move against Santos, he’d still find room in his caucus for a menagerie of wackadoodles, miscreants and borderline traitors who continue to trumpet the Big Lie that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and still poses a threat to our democracy. The Speaker shakes hands and pat backs with people such as:
- Paul Gosar – An Arizona congressman who cavorts with neo-Nazis and who pushed the Big Lie about the 2020 election even after the House reassembled the night of Jan. 6, 2021. He’s a jerk whose own disenchanted siblings have starred in campaign ads for his Democratic opponents.
- Ralph Norman – The South Carolina representative who texted Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows three days before Biden’s inauguration urging Trump to declare “Marshall law” to prevent the peaceful and legal transfer of power.
- Scott Perry – An election denier from Pennsylvania who loudly promoted several insane Big Lie conspiracy theories and was a chief mover behind the effort to install a patsy at the head of the Justice Department to further Trump’s anti-democratic schemes.
- Jim Jordan – A rabid Big Lie purveyor who also took the lead in defending Trump during the Ukraine impeachment (the first one, in case you’ve lost track). It’s documented that, in a previous life as an Ohio State college wrestling coach, Jordan did nothing when his wrestlers and outside referees reported that the team doctor was sexually abusing student athletes.
- Marjorie Taylor Greene – Well, you probably know the tale there, but did you notice that during the Speaker fight even fellow ultraright darling Lauren Boebert has had enough of the Georgia congresswoman’s “Jewish space lasers” act?
The most painful truth is that, while George Santos has no business holding a seat in the People’s House, in the current Republican caucus, he fits right in.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia