Kicking Santos out of Congress

And your response to our campaign launch

Now that we’ve got a Speaker, we’re taking votes again.

This week, some of our votes were substantive and some were symbolic.

Examples of symbolic votes included:

• Reducing the salary of the Director of Bureau of Land Management to $1 

• Reducing the salary of the EPA Administrator to $1 

• Reducing the salary of the Secretary of the Interior to $1

None of those votes passed.

We also had a vote that combined substantive and symbolic: the expulsion of Rep. George Santos.

There is, of course, strong agreement among just about everyone that he fabricated huge portions of his life story. He is also charged with multiple felonies related to the alleged misuse of campaign money. 

I’ve called on him to resign and I still think he should.

But here’s the issue with expelling him this week:

The House is doing an ethics investigation into him right now. They’ve interviewed about 40 witnesses, reviewed over 100k documents, and we are getting a report in about two weeks.

In the history of our country, we have only kicked out five members of Congress. The precedent has been they get some kind of due process before that happens.

Getting convicted of a crime involves due process, as does a formal ethics report.

But since we don’t have either of those things yet, what this vote would have done is change the precedent going forward. The new precedent would be that members of Congress could be expelled before receiving any kind of due process, either internally (ethics investigation) or externally (judicial system).

That would be bad. In my view, it is far better to allow for a process in which the accused has the opportunity to be heard and has some rights. 

Skipping due process might feel ok with someone like Santos because he’s a bit of an obvious case, but the question posed by the expulsion vote wasn’t really about him. To me, it was about whether we wanted to change the threshold for how members can be expelled going forward, and that struck me as a mistake.

It’s also completely unnecessary because we can just wait two weeks and do this properly. The ethics committee is preparing their report and having that will allow us to know that we’ve given him due process, it will leave the existing precedent intact, and I think it will probably end up making the case against him much stronger because of all the evidence they’ve reviewed.

Which raises the question: Why was this expulsion vote brought now instead of in two weeks, when we’ll have the ethics report?

Because there’s a group of congressmen in the majority party from New York who are worried about T.V. ads that are going to run in the next election that tie them to Santos. So, as a pre-emptive defense, they are being as aggressive as possible in attacking Santos as often as they can. 

Which is fine, I get it, but this week their tactic was to try and skip over due process and expel him before the ethics report comes back, and they did that to make it look like they’re really beating him up.

So the vote failed. He was not expelled - not yet. 

I wound up voting against most of my party on this, but I thought it was the right thing to do. 

To be clear, I am fine with kicking him out and will vote to do so, but there’s no reason to do that before the ethics report comes back. 

By the way, for everyone who saw the headlines about people voting not to expel Santos and thought, “What in the world? Why would anyone do that?”, I hear you. If all I had seen were the headlines, I would have thought the same thing. It just so happens there was more to the story.

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Campaign update

Holy smokes, you all really came through for our AG launch. I pitched you on being able to propel a statewide campaign through the power of your donations through this newsletter, and several thousand of you agreed.

The result was a really strong start.

Here’s how I’m going to handle these emails going forward:

I’m still a member of Congress for the rest of my term, and I’m going to continue sending you updates because that’s my job and it’s important to do it well.

But I’m also going to include campaign updates at the bottom - and that’s where I’m also going to ask for your support. 

My idea is that, if I can show you the type of political leadership you appreciate, you’ll respond by helping me cover our expenses so that I’ll have time to do things other than just fundraise. You can’t imagine how much of the schedule normally gets crowded out by that task, but if we can make this method work, it will open up all kinds of new possibilities for our campaign.

In short, I’m going to try and consistently earn your support. I think that’s a model for fundraising that I can defend to anyone. 

On that note, I hope you’ll support us, which you can do here.

Best,

Jeff