Shame is not in the Santos lexicon. At this stage, the dangerous precedent would be set by allowing him to remain
Rep. George Santos has had all the process he is due – and all the donor-financed Botox he deserves.

With the release by the House Ethics Committee of a damning report that offered new details about Santos’s endless lies and sordid self-dealing, the New York Republican must be expelled as soon as possible. Santos poses a test that even this House should be able to summon the will to pass, and his belated declaration that he will not seek election to a second term is entirely inadequate to the appalling circumstances of his conduct.

Before the ethics report, the question of how his fellow lawmakers should deal with Santos presented a tough case. He faces federal indictment on multiple felony charges, and it has been clear since even before Santos was sworn in that he was elected under false pretenses. Pretty much everything he told voters about his background was a lie, and his self-serving assertions that he is somehow the victim of a smear campaign, not the perpetrator of a massive fraud on his constituents, only deepen his culpability.

And yet, expulsion from the House is a drastic measure, one the Constitution wisely requires be accomplished by a two-thirds majority. The House has resorted to that step just five times — ousting three members for joining the Confederacy and, more recently, two others who were convicted of criminal offenses. So, it was understandable earlier this month that lawmakers of both parties balked at voting to expel Santos.

“This would be a terrible precedent to set,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said at the time, “expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime and without internal due process.”

“I can think of four or five Democratic members the Republicans would like to expel without any criminal conviction or adverse ethics findings tomorrow simply because they hate their politics,” Raskin added. “Indeed, the same New York Republicans who want to expel Santos now because he is a complete political albatross for them acted to vigorously defend him in the spring because they wanted his vote for their party on the floor. If members are not going to be expelled for purely political reasons, we need to stick to due process and the rule of law.” Good for Raskin, and the 30 other Democrats who voted with him.

If New York Republicans had a vested interest in seeking to oust Santos, others, including new House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), were not coy about conflating matters of due process and political survival. “We have a four-seat majority in the House,” Johnson told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “We have no margin for error, and so George Santos is due due process, right?” No, he’s entitled to due process whatever the margin, not simply because it’s politically expedient.

Now, the due process argument has evaporated with the Ethics Committee’s unsparing conclusion that there is “substantial evidence” Santos violated the law and that his conduct “warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.” Indeed, the panel’s Republican chair plans to introduce an expulsion resolution. As the report lays out, Santos “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign — and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported ‘repayments’ of those fictitious loans.”

The details are sordid bordering on satire. Santos spent thousands in campaign funds at spas, including for multiple Botox treatments. He used campaign funds to pay for a Las Vegas trip at a time when he told campaign staff he was on his honeymoon. He had $20,000 in campaign funds transferred to his company, then tapped the money to make $6,000 worth of purchases at Ferragamo, withdraw $800 from an ATM at a casino and pay his rent. He set up a political consulting firm, solicited contributions from supporters and then diverted $50,000 into his personal accounts, and used the money for, among other things, a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes and “smaller purchases at Only Fans,” an adult website.

If any doubts remained about whether he deserves expulsion, Santos dispelled them with a self-serving post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Santos decried the bipartisan report as a “disgusting politicized smear that shows the depths of how low our federal government has sunk. Everyone who participated in this grave miscarriage of Justice should all be ashamed of themselves.”

Shame is not in the Santos lexicon. At this stage, the dangerous precedent would be set by allowing him to remain.
(The author is Associate editor with the Washington Post)