New York Democrats probably should have looked into George Santos more

On Dec 19, 2022

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It is not uncommon for it to be revealed that a candidate for election to the U.S. House inflated his résumé.

It is more uncommon for such revelations to come to light only after that individual has already won election, given that there is a period of several months before the election in which the candidate’s opponents would theoretically be scouring his background for any questionable comments or claims.

It is quite uncommon for a successful candidate to the House to be the subject of a lengthy post-election report detailing a wide range of apparent misrepresentations that went unnoticed before voters weighed in.

And it is without precedent that such a report should focus on one of the single-digits pickups for that candidate’s party in the election, pickups that gave the party a narrow majority in the chamber.

So the New York Times’s article about Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.), then, is quite an achievement — and, for Santos, one that comes with surprisingly solid evidence of its existence.

What the Times found when it dug into Santos’s background is pretty remarkable. According to the paper — and uncontested by Santos, who declined to speak to the Times — the incoming House freshman claimed to have attended two colleges that have no record of his enrollment, worked at two financial firms that couldn’t verify his employment, led a nonprofit that was never registered as a nonprofit and ran a company that has no public footprint. He did briefly live in Brazil, as claimed, but he failed to mention apparent criminal charges for check fraud during that residency.

Most of this escaped the notice of his Democratic opponent, Robert Zimmerman, facing off against Santos in New York’s 3rd Congressional District. The district backed Joe Biden by 9 points in 2020 but then backed Santos by about the same amount. The Long Island district was one of four seats that the GOP gained in New York, almost half of the nine seats the Republican Party gained nationally.

There are three payments listed in Zimmerman’s spending labeled as “research consulting,” sending $22,000 to a Maryland company called Deep Dive Political Research. The last payment was dated Sept. 1, about a week after Zimmerman won the Democratic primary with 36 percent of the vote. Speaking to Semafor, Zimmerman noted that he’d elevated some questions about Santos’s background, though he didn’t have most of the details.

Santos’s dubious background also apparently evaded the detection of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the arm of the party tasked with ensuring that its candidates win election. As Semafor noted, a research document created by the DCCC mentioned the dubious nonprofit, though not much else.

The reelection bid of the DCCC’s 2022 chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), also appears on the chart above. His 17th District was another one of the four seats the Republican Party picked up last month.

It’s certainly not clear that revelations about Santos’s unclear background would have derailed his election. His victory wasn’t particularly close and happened on Long Island, where local Rep. Lee Zeldin’s (R) gubernatorial bid fared well. Had this information come to light, Santos would have had time to respond, certainly dampening any negative effect.

Regardless, it didn’t come to light, meaning that the House must now consider whether Santos’s apparent misrepresentations might affect his being sworn in.

That consideration will not take long, since it almost certainly won’t.

The Constitution articulates that the House can “be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” But that doesn’t mean the House can simply exclude people who’ve been elected. As The Washington Post explained in 2017, the chamber’s 1967 effort to exclude New York Rep. Adam Clayton Powell landed at the Supreme Court, which, in 1969, determined that the House could enforce its required qualifications — but couldn’t create new qualifications simply to allow it to block a new legislator.

The House can vote to remove members, of course. It could, for example, very quickly move to oust Santos once seated. But Santos will join a 118th Congress in which Republican control of the House is thin-to-the-point-of-transparency. Republican legislators are not going to want to remove a member of their caucus from a district that voted for Biden in 2020 simply because he inflated his background.

It’s possible that further revelations make Santos’s position untenable in other ways, but it’s safe to assume that the GOP’s bar for excluding him will be remarkably high. If Santos is a political liability going into 2024, of course, that calculus quickly changes.

Political coverage is full of what-if musings, ones that are often fairly abstract. Not here. Here, the question is concrete: How did Santos’s gauzy personal history never became an issue in the 2022 midterm elections? This will undoubtedly lead to a lot of finger pointing within a state party that’s reeling from its poor performance in 2022. It will also likely come up among Republicans who apparently failed to notice their candidate’s Achilles’ heel.

One thing seems fairly certain, however. For at least a little while, the only clear, provable, delineated job on Santos’s recent résumé will be “member of Congress.”