George Santos appealed to democratic norms on Thursday in a last-ditch effort to resist an expected vote to expel him from the US House of Representatives, describing efforts to remove him as “bullying” and warning that “the undoing of a lot of members of this body” would follow.
The embattled Republican congressman, who is facing a third effort to expel him from Congress with a House vote due on Friday, told reporters outside the US Capitol in Washington DC that it was “an unfortunate circumstance to watch Congress waste the American people’s time over and over again on something that is in the power of the people, not the power of Congress”.
Following a congressional ethics report that alleged Santos had used campaign funds for personal gain, including spending on Botox, OnlyFans, which is commonly used to procure pornography, and designer brands such as Hermès, Santos said the move to expel him on the basis of an ethics report was a rejection of precedent.
The report, he argued, was “littered” with hyperbole and opinion. “No decent cop would bring this to a prosecutor or a DA and say here’s our report, go ahead and charge him.”
Santos has already been charged with 23 federal counts including conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud.
Only five members of Congress have previously been expelled. Santos said that lawmakers were “trying to join him to three Confederates and two people convicted in a court of law”.
Santos went on to slam Congress as a “house that doesn’t work for the people” and accused some fellow Republican lawmakers as people “with rap sheets who think and feel emboldened enough to call out other people”.
On Thursday, New York’s Staten Island representative, Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, told CNN: “The earth is round and George Santos should be expelled.”
Republicans have a wafer-thin majority in the House, which will come under further pressure if Santos is expelled and a special election called in his New York district, which takes in a portion of New York City and Long Island.
Malliotakis said of GOP control of the House: “Of course I’m concerned, but that should not be taken into account at the moment. The issue is, should this man be in Congress? He should not.” She further told CNN she thought due process, which some Republicans defending Santos’s place in Congress have said has not been sufficiently followed, had been fulfilled by the thorough ethics review in committee.
But Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee, told the rightwing outlet Newsmax that he was against expulsion, arguing the issue was between Santos and voters in his district. “That’s how our system works,” Jordan said to Newsmax.
Earlier, Santos also said he would introduce a privileged motion to expel Jamaal Bowman, the Democratic New York representative, over an incident in which he set off a fire alarm during a vote, which the House ethics committee had opted not to investigate.
“No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former Congressman George Santos seriously. This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics, and outright fraud,” Bowman said in response.
Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told Axios on Thursday that a vote to expel Santos would now come on Friday. Santos has said that a vote today was “kind of not cool” since it was his second wedding anniversary.
Johnson has said lawmakers should vote with their conscience, adding: “I, personally, have real reservations about doing this. I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that.”
He continued: “I think [that] is the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote, and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.”
Santos has previously described the effort to remove him as a “smear”. In a defiant speech on Tuesday, he hit back: “Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty and they are, in fact, guilty until proven innocent?”
If the move to to expel him is successful, the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, will have to call a special election within 10 days of Santos’s expulsion.
