The Ballad of George Santos

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

What is this country coming to when even a legendary Baruch College volleyball star can’t hold onto a seat in Congress? Are our standards just a bit too high these days? On Thursday, the House of Representatives, in which still sit Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Clay Higgins, and other undisciplined fauna, expelled Rep. George Santos (D-Fantasy Island) on charges of aggravated mopery. More Republicans voted to keep him than voted to 86 him, but 105 of them bucked their leadership to vote yes on the motion to expel. Speaker Mike Johnson dithered and then offered Santos some tepid support, but he did vote against expelling him, as did Steve Scalise and Elise Stefanik, both members of the Republican leadership team in the House.

Thus ends the saga. Santos burned a remarkable trail through a remarkable political age. He lied about almost everything in his public life. He brought into our political ecology several entertaining species, and all of them him. There was the volleyball star, the stoic child of a 9/11 victim, the good “Jew-ish” boy, the party boy dancing in drag in Brazil, self-described Republican “It Girl,” self-described “Mary Magdalene of the Congress,” and the vengeful victim of selective justice. Back on November 24, Santos took to Xwitter to announce his intention to bring the temple down on his own head.  “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re gonna screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them. This shit happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations?”  It was one of the latter that did him in. He’d already dodged expulsion once. Then the House Ethics Committee released its report on his staggering record of corruption. From CNN:  In December 2021, Santos put taxi and hotel charges from Las Vegas on the campaign credit card, even though that was a time when he told his campaign staff he was on his honeymoon and there were no campaign events on his calendar. A Federal Election Commission report listed a July 7, 2022, $3,332.81 Airbnb expenditure as “Hotel stay,” when the campaign’s calendar revealed Santos was “off at [the] Hampton’s for the weekend.” Santos also spent $2,281.52 at resorts in Atlantic City from July 23 to July 24, 2022, a day when his calendar revealed he had one event at 8pm on the 24th entitled “NRCC Candidate.”  Examples in the report include: $1,400 at Virtual Skin Spa in Jericho, New York, in July 2022; $225 at CityMD in Huntington, New York, on August 27, 2022;  $1,500 purchase on the campaign debit card in 2020 was made at Mirza Aesthetics, which was not reported to the FEC and was noted as “Botox” in expense spreadsheets; $1,400 charge at Virtual Skin Spa was a campaign debit card purchase that was also described as “Botox” in the spreadsheets; an unreported PayPal payment of $1,029.30 to an esthetician associated with a spa in Rhinebeck, New York[ $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes, Smaller purchases at Only Fans, Sephora, meals, and parking.  The report also cited some of the more egregious of the barefaced non-facts about his biography in which Santos trafficked.  Topping the vulnerability report are Santos’ lies about his education – that he graduated with an MBA from New York University and a bachelor’s degree from Baruch College. “The registrar offices at both institutions said there was no record of Santos earning any degree from either university,” the report said. The report also detailed “at least three housing eviction lawsuits were filed against Santos and his family in Queens, New York” between 2014 and 2017, and notes that Santos has had “multiple civil judgments filed against him for owing thousands of dollars to creditors.”  In its report, the committee concluded that there “is substantial evidence” that most of the nearly $800,000 that Santos reported making in personal loans to his campaign committee and to an aligned leadership PAC in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles “were not actually made or properly disclosed” to regulators at the Federal Election Commission, known as the FEC.  (Santos ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 before winning his Long Island seat last year.) Additionally, the investigators found that Santos was improperly “reimbursed” with donors’ money for campaign loans he didn’t make.  The House was not amused. And Thursday’s events inevitably ensued. Santos leaves the House with a 23-count federal indictment hanging over his unemployed head. The Justice Department charged him with using contributors’ credit cards to the tune of $44,000. That, too, failed to amuse the House. Santos now joins five other people on the roster of people declared unfit to work in the same body as Mark Foley or Lauren Boebert. Three of them were expelled for fighting on behalf of the Confederate States of America. One of the others went out for involvement in the ABSCAM scandal in 1980. An attempt to expel several members of Congress entangled in the Congressional page sex scandal in 1983 was short-circuited by a congressional censure of the offending congressmen.  Santos is the first member to be expelled since 2002. And that was a doozy, too. Rep. James Traficant and the toupee in question. James Traficant was the congressman from Ohio’s 17th district for 17 years, and on the historical hit-parade of congressional rogues, Trafficant is right near the very top.  He came from Youngstown, the ragged old steel city in Mahoning County. He played football at Pittsburgh alongside Mike Ditka, and he was drafted by teams in both the NFL and AFL, but never went for a professional career. Instead, he went back to Youngstown and build a career as a teacher and social worker. Eventually, he was elected sheriff of Mahoning County. Trafficant burnished his populist credentials by refusing to serve foreclosure notices on local families destroyed by the withering of Youngstown’s manufacturing base. In 1983, however, he was served with a RICO indictment charging him with accepting bribes. Traficant represented himself and he remains the only pro se defendant to beat a RICO rap. This gave him sufficient local cachet to get elected to Congress in 1984.  In Congress, Traficant cut a bizarre figure. He owned the worst toupee in American history. He dressed in strange colors and wore cowboy boots. His rants on the floor were the stuff of legend. In 1995, the Republicans took over the House, and Traficant , a Democrat, gleefully voted with them most of the time. He regularly ended his speeches from the floor with, “Beam me up, Mr. Speaker.” Once, he spoke against US foreign aid to the Soviet Union, saying,  “Russia gets $15 billion in foreign aid from Uncle Sam. In exchange, Uncle Sam gets nuclear missiles pointed at our cities, two tape decks and three cases of vodka. Beam me up.”  Things got very weird when he began stanning for alleged Nazi war criminals, including John Demjanjuk, who had been convicted in Israel for being a brutal guard at German concentration camps. He slid steadily toward the more rancid frontiers of populism. He also was enriching himself in office. A number of his acquaintances in Ohio were arrested on corruption charges and the shadow of their convictions gradually engulfed him. Once again, he was brought to trial under the RICO law, and once again he defended himself. This time, however things turned out differently. From the Washington Post:  Mr. Traficant claimed he was a victim of a conspiracy involving Attorney General Janet Reno, grudge-bearing witnesses and a hostile federal judge. The truth, sir, is rarely in you,” the judge, Lesley Brooks Wells, told Mr. Traficant when she sentenced him to eight years in federal prison and to pay more than $250,000 in fines and restitution. “You were howling that you were going to fight like a junkyard dog in the eye of a hurricane, and you did fight that way, to protect a junkyard full of deceit and corruption and greed.” When Mr. Traficant went to prison, he had to reveal to guards that his towering stack of hair was, in fact, a toupee.  In 2001, Traficant was convicted of using campaign money for his own purposes, which is a lot of what George Santos is accused of at the moment. The House then moved to expel him, which passed 402-1. The lone vote for Traficant was cast by Rep. Gary Condit, who had his own problems at the time.  Traficant did a seven-year bid in federal prison. While Traficant was imprisoned, his cause was taken up by David Duke, the famously ambitious and telegenic face of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke posted a letter he’d allegedly received from Traficant in which the ex-congressman intimated that he had knowledge of the real stories behind almost every instance of political violence in the second half of the 20th century, from Dealey Plaza to the siege at Waco. Traficant’s cause was taken up by one Michael Collins Piper, a raging anti-Semite who believed that Mossad killed both Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Piper had been attracted to Traficant’s case because of the latter’s involvement with Demjanjuk’s defense.  In 2014, Traficant died after being injured in a tractor accident on his farm. He rises again in the news because of George Santos who, alas, stopped amusing the House of Representatives.