House votes on expelling George Santos from Congress
A day after Representative George Santos of New York nearly challenged his colleagues to expel him from the House of Representatives, the House is expected to vote on Friday for the third time this year on whether his brazen misdeeds and string of criminal charges warrant his removal from Congress. .
Whether the outcome will be different this time remains unclear. Expelling a representative requires a two-thirds majority, meaning significant bipartisan consensus is needed in a House almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
Neither party is conducting a count that could guide the outcome of the vote, although Democrats are expected to vote overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Santos’ expulsion. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has said his party members should vote their conscience and indicated he had reservations about impeaching Mr. Santos.
Since the House Ethics Committee released a scathing report on Mr. Santos about two weeks ago, a number of lawmakers in both parties who previously opposed expelling the first-term Republican have publicly changed their minds.
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives debated for an hour Thursday over whether to expel Mr. Santos, a serial fabulist whose tapestry of lies and schemes made him a figure of national ridicule and the subject of a 23 federal indictment points.
The Ethics Commission’s report was at the center of Thursday’s debate, as Mr. Santos and his defenders argued that deporting him without a criminal conviction could override the will of voters and trigger a host of frivolous removal attempts .
But the lawmakers who spoke in favor of his impeachment — most of them from his own party — argued that the report was substantial and compelling.
Representative Anthony D’Esposito of New York, the first incumbent Republican in the House of Representatives to call on Santos to resign, emphasized that he believed members of Congress should be held to higher standards of behavior.
“I ask my colleagues: if we don’t take the Ethics Commission and its results seriously, why does this commission exist at all?” said Mr D’Esposito.
Mr Santos himself has said he expected to be removed from office, a position he reiterated on Thursday. But even as he insisted he would be “at peace” with an eventual decision to expel him, he has said, in characteristic defiance, that he would not resign.
Rep. Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, said expelling Mr. Santos would threaten the integrity of the Legislature and break with past precedent.
Only five members of the House have been removed in the history of the body. Three of them were expelled for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two others, one in 1980 and one in 2002, were removed from office after criminal convictions.
At the end of the debate, Mr Santos appeared to acknowledge that his comments would have little impact on the outcome of Friday’s vote.
“If tomorrow, when this vote takes place, it is in the conscience of all my colleagues that they believe this is the right thing to do, then so be it. Take the vote,” Mr. Santos said. “I’m at peace with it.”