It’s official: Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has been kicked out of Congress.
The expulsion vote came just over two weeks after the release of a scathing House Ethics Committee report detailing a litany of the now-former congressman’s greatest hits—the misuse of campaign funds to pay for Botox, luxury items from Hermes, expensive meals, and OnlyFans memberships. The allegations, which Santos still denies, made for a storybook ending to Santos’ short-lived, controversial time in Congress.
The disgraced ex-representative’s unprecedented clown show proved to be too much of an embarrassment even for the GOP—perhaps Santos’ most impressive political achievement, given the Republican Party’s innate immunity to being shamed by the never-ending tomfoolery of its members.
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Santos seemed determined to take his GOP colleagues down the proverbial shame-spiral with him, calling them hypocrites and, during a broadcast on X (formerly Twitter), claimed that they’re “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist they’re going to screw.” Santos also accused his colleagues of insider trading and not showing up to vote “because they’re too hungover.”
But Santos’ shots at the GOP proved to be nothing but blanks—there’s nothing he can say about Republican Party members that the general public doesn’t already know.
There’s former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who also accused his GOP colleagues of doing cocaine, “inviting him to orgies,” and engaging in “sexual perversion”—before POLITICO obtained two images of Cawthorn wearing women’s lingerie in 2022. Cawthorn, who argued we must “reclaim and restore masculinity in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man,” could not escape his rank hypocrisy and lost his seat after being defeated in the 2022 GOP primary.
Cawthorn, at one point the youngest member of the House, had until then managed to survive multiple sexual misconduct allegations, a call for “more bloodshed” after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and what Cawthorn referred to as a “bucket list” visit to Hitler’s vacation home.
Then there’s former Rep.Tim Murphy (R-PA), a staunch anti-abortion advocate who privately encouraged his mistress to have an abortion, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2017. Murphy eventually resigned.
And there’s former Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), who voluntarily left office after he was accused of unhooking a lobbyist’s bra and rubbing her back without her consent in 2017.
And just this year, the Justice Department announced that former Rep. Stephen Buyer (R-IN) was sentenced to 22 months in prison after he was convicted of engaging in insider trading twice.
Yes, these examples—and many more—make any tea Santos plans to spill either now or in the future lukewarm at best. Instead, it is the fact that Santos was elected and brought into the GOP fold at all that proves the Republican Party is a dumpster fire of less-than-surprising proportions.
Among his Jewish space laser conspiracy-believing, “here are photos and videos of the women I had sex with” bragging, and shameless insurrection-inciting colleagues, was Santos—a man who stands accused of identity theft and credit card fraud.
He also lied about his mother being in one of the Twin Towers during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack—she was out of the country at the time—and falsely claimed he produced Broadway’s Spider-Man musical. He also said he graduated from a college that cannot find any record of his attendance and he said he lost employees as a result of the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 despite no evidence; and he proudly proclaimed he founded a charity that heroically rescued 2,400 dogs and 280 cats, but which the IRS cannot corroborate.
His lies were and continue to be laughable at best, no doubt. Yet Santos has continuously doubled down with little to no regard for how it made him, or his party, look.
After all, why bother? The frontrunner and likely Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump, is a twice-impeached former president, facing 91 felony counts in four criminal cases in Washington, New York, Florida, and Georgia… so far. The very leader of the GOP has paid $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit for his faux university and $5 million (and counting) after being found liable for sexual assault.
And still, the Republican Party stands behind and beside him, come hell or the end of U.S. democracy as we know it.
That Santos and his shameless antics become too much for the GOP to stomach proves that despite all evidence to the contrary, there is a rock bottom for the Republican Party—one of its own making, to be sure, but one that actually exists beyond sexual harassment, hypocrisy, fraud, alleged pedophilia (Hi, Roy Moore) and an attempted coup.
It just took a George Santos, apparently, to find it.
So if the former congressman truly wanted to create a chaotic “dogs and cats living together” type situation on his way out, he would have labeled his GOP colleagues as ethical, hard-working lawmakers dedicated to serving the will of the American voters—meaning they’re for protecting abortion rights, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and leaving trans people the hell alone.
Now that would be some piping-hot tea. Unfortunately, and like nearly everything else Santos has publicly proclaimed, it would also be a lie.
