The phenomenon of George Santos (R-N.Y.) should come as no surprise.
I don’t have to recount the lies he told to get elected to Congress. He admittedly “embellished” his resumé, lying about his educational background and his ethnicity (at various times, he claimed he was “Jew-ish,” the scion of holocaust survivors, and even said he was “Caucasion and black”).
The circumstances of the death of his mother, whose life he said “9/11 claimed,” were a flat-out lie. In fact, she died in December 2016, 15 years later. I put “George Santos lies” into Google and got a startling 51 million hits, surpassing even Donald Trump, who came up with only 34 million.
Santos’s murky finances are also a great big Pinocchio mirage. In 2020, when he first ran for Congress, he claimed he had a salary of $55,000 from a small company. By 2022, his net worth mysteriously soared to somewhere between $3.5 and $11.5 million, according to campaign filings, and he wasn’t even in Congress yet. So far, there has been no adequate explanation.
The murky financial picture is among the most serious questions about Santos. Unknown is the exact source of the $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his campaign in 2022, just two years after filing a financial disclosure report that stated he had no major assets or earned income. The New York Times also reported suspicious spending by Santos’s campaign.
The offices of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly (R) and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz (D) each said they are investigating Santos. ABC News reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island, was also looking into his conduct.
Will these irregularities trigger a special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District so that an electorate, informed of the facts about Santos, can make an intelligent decision on his candidacy? Not bloody likely.
The American people have believed lies throughout their history. We believe what we want to believe and reject the truth when it is staring us right in the face.
The 17th century religious charlatan Cotton Mather told his Massachusetts flock that the world was coming to an end in a week. Then he extended the deadline by a week and then a month, and finally shifted his pronouncements to other topics.
Some lies can be generally accepted. A woman lies about her age; a political candidate distorts his opponent’s record. But they can do much harm.
Orson Welles provoked mass hysteria in his 1938 radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” proclaiming that the Martians were coming. He was so convincing that people, terrified of an imminent extra-terrestrial attack, “ran into the streets screaming that the world was ending. Churches were emptied of their congregations, cinemas of their audiences, restaurants of their patrons. Panic-stricken families rushed to their cars and drove like lunatics in a bid to escape Martian annihilation.”
The issue is how to get Santos out of Congress, assuming he chooses not to resign.
The only qualifications for House membership are spelled out in Article I, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution:
“No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”
Of course, it is possible that Santos is not a citizen. He claims to have been born in Queens to immigrant parents. But his history of lies about virtually everything else may cause Congress to question this claim. He has also sometimes referred to himself as an “immigrant,” and former coworkers say he told them he was born in Brazil, not Queens.
So, has he been a citizen for at least seven years? Who knows? The best evidence that Santos is a citizen is that he may have participated in a sham marriage to bring his “wife” over from Brazil. Although Santos is openly gay, documents have surfaced showing that Santos was “married” to a woman, whom he divorced the year before running for Congress. (Not the best way to prove eligibility.)
Given that Santos appears to be a pathological liar and the constitutional requirement that he be a citizen to serve in the House, perhaps he could produce a birth certificate or his naturalization papers to clarify the situation. So far, Santos has refused to do so.
Evidently, it never occurred to James Madison in 1789 that a House member could be indicted or convicted for a serious crime. Perhaps the assumption was that if such a horrific thing ever happened, the scoundrel would withdraw.
But so far, Santos isn’t budging. He will be sworn in today. The House makes its own rules, and the Republican majority could refuse to seat him. But this has happened rarely in our history, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), already on shaky ground, desperately needs Santos’s vote to grab his coveted Speakership.
James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.