House avoids sacking George Santos: For good reason? 

If you blinked twice last Wednesday, you may have missed that the House voted on a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), choosing instead of expulsion to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee. 

To keep a short story short: Rep. Robert Garcia (R-Calif.) introduced the expulsion resolution (H. Res. 114) back on Feb. 9; announced on May 16 he intended to call it up in the chamber as a question of House privilege; and the next day did just that at 5:01 p.m.    

Rep. Anthony Esposito (R-N.Y.), immediately offered a privileged motion to refer the resolution to the Ethics Committee. He explained that he was one of the first members to call for Santos to resign and favored the resolution; but because it had nowhere near the two-thirds vote to succeed, believed referral to the Ethics Committee was the quickest way of ridding the House of “this scourge on  government” who “is a stain on this institution.” With that, Esposito yielded back the balance of his hour and moved the previous question. 

At 5:34 p.m. the final tally was announced — a straight party-line vote of 221-204 in favor of referral, with seven Democrats voting present — including all five Ethics Committee Democrats. 

To the general public, had it taken notice, such a perfunctory process might seem like a gross abuse of majority party power to avoid a full debate and accounting of an egregious case of a member being elected under false pretenses. In a Dec. 30, 2022, column in this space, I termed it, “the biggest voter scam in House history.”  Santos has since been indicted on 13 federal criminal charges including mail fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making false statements to Congress.    

Congress is well known for shuffling things off to committees for study to avoid taking action on vexing problems. But from my experience working on House rules and standards of conduct for over a quarter of a century, ethics scandals are treated more seriously. Whenever the House has been hit by scandals over the decades, its first reaction has been to clean-up the mess and then ensure such outrages do not happen again by enacting corrective laws and rules.   

The purpose for having a completely bipartisan House ethics committee of five Republicans and five Democrats, with the authority to delegate work to an independent special investigative unit if necessary, is a sign that the institution is extra-sensitive about projecting and delivering on a full and fair disposition of ethics complaints while ensuring standard legal protections to the accused. 

No Member enjoys the ridicule and doubt cast on Congress as the First Branch of government nor on the Constitution they have been sworn to preserve and protect. That’s why the House has put a credible and workable ethics process in place.  

While I have no doubt a vast majority of House Democrats and Republicans would favor expelling Santos today, Republicans pulled back for one very understandable, though not wholly excusable reason: the GOP has such a slim margin of majority control in the chamber that the loss of even one member will jeopardize that control and the party’s ability to take a record of  accomplishments into the next election. That stark political reality can explain at least the partisan unanimity in the straight partisan vote to refer the Santos matter to Ethics, if not support its moral justification.   

One also has to look at this from the standpoint of the source of the expulsion resolution — a Democratic member from California. I have no doubt Rep. Garcia feels strongly about the Santos blight on the House and is sincere in his belief that he should be expelled, and the sooner the better. But, he had no realistic expectation that there would be a two-thirds House vote for expulsion. That would take 290 out of 435 members, 222 of whom are Republicans and 213, Democrats.  What then was his motive? He simply wanted to put all members on record (i.e., on the spot) as to where they stood on keeping a member such as Santos drawing a government salary and voting on important national issues.   

It is not dishonest or dishonorable to let the public know where members of the opposition party stand on the issues. But when it comes to such a sensitive matter as the honor and integrity of the House, it has clear implications for being misunderstood and misused, politically. We needn’t go into a “who shot John?” history of the House partisan wars that have become increasingly nasty since the 1990s to know how they have been used to personally destroy members of the opposition party by hurling ethical misconduct charges.   

We have already seen both parties in this and the previous Congress use the power to appoint committee members being interfered with for partisan and personal purposes. The last thing the House needs now is a re-escalation of the ethics wars being used willy-nilly to call for votes on the expulsion of opposition party members. The Santos case is one that should be dealt with thoroughly and expeditiously under the existing ethics process.  I have every confidence it will be. 

Don Wolfensberger is a Congress Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, former staff director of the House Rules Committee, and author of, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays.”  The views expressed are solely his own.