As Santos Goes, So Goes The House?
Although George Santos — representing, dubiously, the 3rd district of New York — has denied he is mulling a plea deal, federal prosecutors have said this afternoon that they are in “conversations” wit
As George Santos goes, so goes the House of Representatives? Possibly-maybe. But, more than likely, who knows? Scott McFarlane today tweeted: “Justice Dept asks to delay Thursday hearing in criminal fraud case of Rep George Santos (R-NY) until Oct 27, saying ‘The parties have continued to discuss possible paths forward in this matter. The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.’"
Although George Santos — representing, dubiously, the 3rd district of New York — has denied he is mulling a plea deal, federal prosecutors have said this afternoon that they are in “conversations” with the fabulist Congressman. I’m going to go out on a limb and trust federal prosecutors as the truth-tellers here, over Representative Santos texting a media organization. In the series of texts to Talking Points Media, Santos called the suggestion that the prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York is working on a plea agreement with his counsel “wildly inaccurate.”
But then, so is his entire life story. A tissue of lies; nearly every utterance of him is yam-yam. From his lies that he was a producer for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (inexplicable), to the lie that he was not a drag queen (indubitable). To his lies that he was a Baruch and NYU graduate (easily fact-checked), to his claims of Jewishness (“Jew-ish?!”). It is difficult, to say the least, to take this serial liar at his word on anything. "I think every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but,'" Mary McCarthy is said to have said about Lillian Hellman once upon a time in the United States of Amnesia …
Still, George Santos has held onto legislative power in the 3rd district for about 8 months, largely because his political patron, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has backed him (Until, of course, he pleads guilty, then all bets are off).
Because Kevin McCarthy needs him. He needs every damn Republican vote. His margins are just too tight. As Annie Karni wrote for the Times in May:
Since the day he set foot in Washington, Representative George Santos of New York has been shunned by some of his fellow Republicans and protected by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has consistently defended his right to serve in Congress despite the fictional persona he created and the geyser of falsehoods he told to win election.
… While an association with Mr. Santos may be a political drag on Republicans, the impact of his resignation would pose a challenge for leadership. With a slim majority in the House and a fight over the debt ceiling looming, Mr. McCarthy cannot afford to lose Mr. Santos’s vote. The speaker only narrowly passed a bill last month to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts, with no Republican votes to spare and Mr. Santos in the “yes” column.
As negotiations with the White House continue, Mr. McCarthy may have more trouble keeping the support of Republicans on the right flank of his party, making Mr. Santos’s vote all the more crucial.
The Nassau County Republican party asked him to resign months ago. They gathered this past January at the headquarters of the Nassau County Republican Committee to lacerate him publicly. Better to chop off the gangrenous limb was their reasoning. And, like his party leader, DJT, Santos exhibited a startling amount of shamelessness at being caught red-handed, instead using the opportunity to neither admit guilt or express regret, but to attack his adversaries. The party of Trump, ladies and gentlemen of jury — the party of Trump. Further, dozens of Republicans in New York State have asked Santos to resign, probably out of fears of electoral backlash against the party for backing such a buffoon. “Why is it so hard for Kevin to simply do the will of the Nassau Republican Party?” I wrote at the time, thoroughly vexed. “Long Island Republicans, got the Republicans into the Majority in the House of Representatives.”
It is the worst possible look for the then-incoming Speaker of the House — weakness combined with a willingness to bend norms for political advantage. And yet, New York’s “red wave,” which accounted for roughly a third of the Republican wins last November, granting them the House, might be in jeopardy precisely because of how McCarthy handled — or, rather, mishandled — the problem of such a thin margin of victory. New York’s Third District was once very Democrat, though recently it was interspliced with a chunk of Long Island, thus dampening that ardor (Thanks, Andrew Cuomo!). We cannot fail to note that it is indeed ironic that Nassau County, which was the destination of “white flight” from Queens Village in the 1970s and early 80s, now conveniently dilutes the Democrat vote in NY-3.
In 2024, Democrats are returning to the fray with a vengeance on the principle that the key to regaining the House is straight through Andrew Cuomo’s flaming dumpster fire that was New York Congressional map chaos. From The Hill’s Caroline Vakil and Zach Schonfeld:
The party is allocating tens of millions of dollars to target districts held by House Republicans, including Reps. George Santos, Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler and Brandon Williams, as Democrats seek to win back the majority in 2024.
“The eyes of the nation are upon us in New York,” said Democratic strategist Peter Kauffmann.
New York Republicans are understandably worried. There have been protests outside of Santos’s office, which is not a good look for the party in power holding on to that seat, just barely. It does not augur well for the Republicans in keeping the district, should Santos give it up for a special election within the next few months. Upstate Republican New York Representative Claudia Tenney, who said that she was “horrified by (Santos's) behavior,” noted to the Times that she did not expect Mr. Santos to finish out his term (who does, really?). The Congresswoman added that her colleagues in districts closer to Mr. Santos’s felt more political pressure to call for his immediate resignation, back in May. “They feel like it’s impacting them more directly downstate,” she told Karni. Ouch.
Already New York Republicans are moving to Plan B — Immigration. With vigor. The Queens Village Republican Club, a small but rowdy group, are stoking xenophobia in the ethnically and economically diverse outer borough, rallying residents against immigrants. So far the numbers are small, but Democrats should be on top of this. The Republican game appeals to some of the basest instincts in the human species — xenophobia and tribe pride. From Naeisha Rose of the Queens Chronicle:
Twenty-four hours after Mayor Adams officially confirmed on Wednesday that the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village will house up to 1,000 migrant men, a protest and a press conference were held 30 minutes apart outside and within the complex, respectively.
Joe Concannon, chairman of the Queens Village Republican Club, led the latter with approximately 100 people outside the playground of PS 18, which is directly across the street from the campus at Hillside Avenue and Avenue C.
As it happens, Queens Village is represented by — you guessed it — the artist formerly known as Kitara Ravache. And across the district have sprung up handmade signs with xenophobic sentiments, trying to light a (far right) fire in the borough of immigrants against the migrant shelter. It has all the hallmarks of a GOP experiment. The operating costs are low and they might yield results as Governor Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams appear unable, unaware or unconcerned (I cant tell which) about this how to deal with this new appeal — to immigrants against immigrants — regarding the possibility declining property values linked to migrant shelters.
The median property value in NY3 is over $633,000, which is a source of great pride to many residents, regardless of from whence they originally came from. 22.6% of NY3 residents are foreign-born and many more are related to someone foreign-born, nearly twice the national average. So, can the Republicans thread the needle on that argument? Interestingly, they are using the some of the same arguments that the New Right made against busing, nationally, and in the borough against blacks moving in to homes in the age of Archie Bunker, 50 years ago. Will the Archie Bunker argument work on the Southeast Asian, Korean, Latino and Caribbean immigrants of Queens?
Time will tell.
“For example, here’s an Oklahoma newspaper reporting the following headline: ‘Oklahoma’s violent crime rate higher than average’ with a prominent image showing Oklahoma’s reported ‘violent crime’ increasing 1.9%. But murder was also down 6.2% over the same time period, and the paper chose not to lead with that. Or how about this headline from WBTV in Charlotte: ‘Police in Charlotte investigating 13 homicides so far this month, making October deadliest month this year.’ What true fact is left out of this headline? Murders in Charlotte were down 14% so far that year. But how the news chooses true anecdotes to distort the interpretation of the world is a deeper problem than which kinds of crimes get emphasized at which times. It is often used to distort our understanding of what other people—particularly people who we don’t interact with—think about the world.” (Alec Karakatsanis/EqualityAlec)
“The argument was that while both parties are pretty hawkish on China in Washington, if you look at public opinion polling, you see there’s a pretty vast gap between Republicans who are much more likely to see China as an enemy, and Democrats who are more likely to see Russia as an enemy. And my argument is that many of the Republican and conservative figures, whether it’s Republican presidential candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis, or TV figures like Tucker Carlson, get called isolationists. But they’re actually much more isolationist when it comes to Russia than they are on China. In China, they tend to be much more hawkish.” (Peter Beinart)
“The Courage to Be Free is more campaign document than memoir, of course, meant to certify his populist credentials. Not an easy feat for a Yale and Harvard grad. Many of DeSantis’s descriptions of the Yale of the late 1990s are wild exaggerations. At Yale, he writes, ‘we were led to believe that communism was superior.’ ‘Around campus, there was nothing wrong with flying Soviet flags, wearing Che Guevara shirts, and paying homage to Mao Zedong.’ None of this rings true. But the distortions are revealing. ‘In retrospect,’ DeSantis writes, ‘Yale allowed me to see the future.’ D might not have been very political in those years. But it was clearly there, at 1990s Yale, that DeSantis’s political sensibilities were formed. For back then, something went wrong at Yale—something emblematic, which foretold the country’s future path. DeSantis, because he is a right-wing Republican governor of Florida in the middle of a presidential campaign, calls what went wrong the ‘unbridled leftism’ of an ‘arrogant, stale, and failed ruling class.’ I—a politically left history professor at the University of Chicago who spends most of his days alone in his study quietly reading and writing books, including about this era of U.S. history—would put it differently. Instead of ‘unbridled leftism,’ I recall arrogant ‘third-way’ Clinton-era liberalism.” (Jonathan Levy/TAP)
“What’s the matter with Florida at the moment might boil down to Ron DeSantis, and his crass willingness to sacrifice his state’s future to his own culture war campaign. What’s the matter with the GOP’s larger anti-education campaign is that it can do a lot of damage before it ultimately fails. It will fail because it’s based on a losing bet—that a party can permanently ride the grievances of a shrinking minority—and because it’s at odds with the long-term sources of economic, cultural, and civic development. Someday historians will see the anti-college campaign as the death throes of a doomed movement, like the last stages of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. But someday could take a long time. What can the college community—leaders, teachers, neighbors, students—do in the meanwhile? They can be confident and calm, knowing that they’re in a high-stakes tactical struggle but that the strategic prospects are bright. Time is indeed on their side.” (James Fallows)
“Nearly three quarters of US farmers say this year’s drought is hurting their harvest – with significant crop and income loss, according to a new survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying group that represents agricultural interests.This year’s drought conditions are taking a harder toll than last year’s, as 37% of farmers said they are plowing through and killing existing crops that won’t reach maturity because of dry conditions. That’s a jump from 24% last year, according to the survey. July was the third-hottest on record for the US and ranked in the top 10 for every state in the West except for Montana, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.” (Vanessa Yurkevich/ CNN)
“Besides the laughable Biden brand slam, why should the public care at all about Hunter, or any Presidential relative not actively crime-ing in the White House? Going after Presidential family members to besmirch the leader is effective politics, and Democratic Presidential families have provided plenty of black sheep for the purpose. Bill Clinton had his Roger, a half brother who the Secret Service code-named ‘Headache’ for his shenanigans. While Clinton was governor of Arkansas, Roger spent time in prison for cocaine possession and drug trafficking. In 1995, while his brother was the Leader of the Free World, he was caught out accepting a Rolex and $50k from some Gambino kids who wanted to get a pardon for their imprisoned mob dad. Jimmy Carter had brother Billy, a drunk who once once urinated on an airport runway in full view of the press and dignitaries and who in 1979, was drinking half a gallon of vodka and whiskey a day.” (Nina Burleigh/American Political Freakshow)