With Santos Ouster, a chaotic conference writes history again

Moments after members of the House of Representatives cast a historic vote to expel Representative George Santos of New York, Speaker Mike Johnson pounded the gavel with a grim look on his face.

“In view of the expulsion of the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, the total number of members of the House now stands at 434,” he announced gravely in an unusually quiet chamber of the House, speaking with a faint grimaced looking down.

It made official what had become clear in recent days — that many of his fellow Republicans had been willing to defy his wishes to keep Mr. Santos, a serial fabulist, in Congress, and that Mr. Johnson and his party were now faced more and more problems. more brutal political mathematics. Their narrow majority of four votes has shrunk to just three.

That will make governing more difficult for Republicans, who have already had enormous difficulty rallying their fractious members to push legislation through the closely divided House. A pair of government funding deadlines early next year will test Mr Johnson’s ability to maneuver through an impending shutdown and keep his job with even less leeway in his party than before.

It was also a rare achievement to address an obvious mistake by a Chamber that has distinguished itself this year mainly by paralysis and dysfunction in times of crisis.

Mr. Santos’s impeachment came at a Congress marked by historic levels of chaos. The disarray erupted in January when Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, waged the longest battle ever to win the top post in the House of Representatives. In October, he became the first speaker in history to be removed from office, amid multiple Republican mutinies that have paralyzed legislative business and exposed the party’s divisions.

Now that the 118th Congress is on track the fewest bills from any Congress in decades, Some Republicans in the House of Representatives have come to describe the state of their party as an international disgrace.

Through it all, Mr. Santos has been his own symbol of chaos. After The New York Times exposed Santos’s numerous lies about his biography and federal investigators charged him with multiple crimes, his fellow Republicans protected him.

But in the end, it was the Republicans’ raw political interest that caused Santos’ downfall, even if it left them with an immediate math problem. After concluding that allowing Mr. Santos to seek re-election would cost Republicans a competitive seat in Congress, Mr. McCarthy urged that a House Ethics Committee investigation into his behavior would be more aggressive and public than is traditionally the case.

The result was a damning Ethics Commission report that alienated many Republicans, who ultimately calculated that the clear evidence of Mr. Santos’ lies and fraud was more damaging to the party than the value of his single vote. Nearly half of them voted to deport him on Friday. Several argued that Santos was too much of a hindrance to the Republican Party in New York and that it would be easier for the party to win the seat in the next election without him.

Since the Civil War, no member of Congress had been expelled without a criminal conviction. But members of the ethics panel argued that a new standard could be set: A scathing bipartisan report from the commission could be sufficient grounds for expulsion.

“For me, it was pretty easy to remove the vote because there was a unanimous recommendation from the Ethics Committee,” said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Rules Committee chairman who is known as an institutional and leadership ally. “I have a lot of confidence in those people. There is no disagreement about that.”

Mr. Cole also acknowledged the difficult political math for Republicans, who will try to strike two different spending deals in January and February to keep the government open. By then, New York will not be able to fill Santos’ seat through a special election.

Mr. Santos’ resignation means that Mr. Johnson could lose only three Republican votes to Democrats on any piece of legislation if all members of the House are present and voting. Another Republican, Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio, announced he would do so will leave Congress in the coming months to become president of Youngstown State University in Ohio.

Mr Cole said he was unhappy that his party would lose a valuable vote.

“I’d rather not do that, but in this case I think you have to do what the institution demands,” Mr. Cole said.

Rep. Michael Guest, Republican of Mississippi and chairman of the Ethics Committee, said he appreciated that Mr. Johnson did not pressure members to bail out Mr. Santos, even though he made clear early this week that he had strong reservations had in removing the New Yorker.

“I applaud the leadership for not opposing this vote and trying to protect Mr. Santos and keep him in the House of Representatives just to protect our very slim majority,” Mr. Guest said.

Still, several members said they were concerned about retaliation and starting a new cycle of payback. Actions like impeachment, censure, and removing a member from committees—once extremely rare—have already become more common and mired in cycles of pettiness, politics, and resentment.

Even as he went public, Mr. Santos tried to introduce a resolution to expel another New York lawmaker, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat who pleaded guilty to pulling a fire alarm in a House office building.

“Over the past four years we have been politically lectured, much of it in the press, about our institutions. What happened here today goes against the principles of our institutions,” said Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, who voted to save Mr. Santos. He challenged lawmakers to impeach a Democratic senator who is also under indictment as revenge: “Bring the articles for Bob Menendez to the Senate,” he said.

Representative Glenn F. Ivey, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the ethics committee, said he had already noticed an increase in the number of complaints coming into the panel that seemed personal and partisan.

“We’re getting stuff that looks like it really doesn’t meet the standards of what should be coming to us,” Mr. Ivey said. “We have to be careful with things like that.”

Still, he said he was proud of the work of the commission, which has spent decades building a reputation for recklessness and secrecy.

“This scale of misconduct is really quite astonishing,” Mr. Ivey said of Mr. Santos. ‘The Ethics Committee was of the opinion that we are essentially a toothless tiger. This is where legitimate complaints died. And I hope this changes that and makes it clear, not just to the American people but to ourselves, that we are really watching ourselves.”