Shameless

 

State of the Union, February 2023. Photo by Getty Images.

So they managed to expel George Santos. For the handicappers, the special election to fill out his term will be held sometime in February, with the candidates chosen by party leaderships; the main contenders on the Democratic side will be furious centrist Tom Suozzi (seeking to recapture the seat he abandoned last year in a stupid furious-centrist run for the New York governorship, which is what got Santos elected in the first place) and Anna Kaplan, an Iranian-Jewish refugee who's served as a "social-liberal" state senator (after losing to Suozzi in the 2016 primary for the House seat). I imagine either Democrat has a pretty good chance of winning; the district has a lot of Republicans, but not so many doctrinaire ones, and they're really angry at the Republican party for the embarrassment of Santos.

The one point I really want to make about the expulsion itself, because I don't thing anybody else is making it, is addressed to Santos's (and Speaker Mike Johnson's) assertion that expelling a Congressman who has merely been charged, not convicted, with the seven counts he was indicted for last May and the 23 more in the superseding indictment in October, is an unprecedented and therefore bad and dangerous thing to do. That's not exactly correct.

Santos

 

Via NBC News.

To my amazement, I find I've never written a blogpost on Congressman George Santos. How could that be?

I've given him plenty of attention on Twitter, in any case, mostly to the effect that his hilarious tall tales, from the story of his having been on a championship Baruch College volleyball team to his having been a producer of the doomed Spiderman musical to his mother's having actually died on two separate occasions, a pretty unique experience, are of far less importance in the broad scheme of things than the corruption involved in his getting into Congress, the fraudulent fundraising, the misuse of campaign funds for his own personal enjoyment, and the feeding of really large amounts of money from secret sources, all of which play roles in the federal indictments that arrived today from New York's Eastern District in an Islip courtroom.

Four-minute story on NPR this morning predicted he'd serve full term and be up for reelection in '24, without even once mentioning these campaign-finance issues. I'm glad somebody's in the legacy media is starting to notice.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) February 13, 2023