Republican Rep. George Santos filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday his intent to run for reelection in 2024. The sound you are probably hearing is not champagne corks but heads exploding at the Nassau County, NY, Republican Party headquarters. And the echo reverberates all the way to DC, where Sen. Mitt Romney is preparing to strike a majestic Hamlet-like pose of shame.
Yes, the shock and shame of having a popularly elected official who lied about his resume and is accused of writing some bad checks! The shame of having a politician who seems to go from having no money to having a ton of money! Unheard of in Long Island or Washington politics. Never mind that the local party has, over the years, been accused of endorsing a few questionable characters, with at least one local party leader going to jail in recent election cycles.
But George Santos, the bisexual, openly gay Brazilian guy from Queens? That’s a bridge too far. And yet the congressman with the fabulist resume is already famous on Saturday Night Live. The 34-year-old law and order candidate who came from nowhere to beat the Democrat and Working Family Party candidate Robert Zimmerman even merited a string of jokes at the Oscars. Three months into his first term, he is a national figure.
And there he was, front and center at the State of the Union, being lectured to by Romney on honesty, even as Romney dutifully applauded never-tell-a-fib Joe Biden. As New York’s WOR radio host Mark Simone said, George Santos wasn’t there to support the GOP. He was there to sit at the feet of the master and take notes. Yes, the same Joe Biden whose family used to work 12-hour shifts in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, who used to attend a black church on Sunday, a Jewish synagogue on Saturday, and who was embedded in the Puerto Rican community, all while he was fending off Corn Pop in the ghetto, and being arrested with Nelson Mandela, and getting three college degrees, finishing first in his law school class, only to go on to his job as a truck driver, and later college professor, no joke. If a man with that backstory could become president, what heights could this poor kid from Queens achieve if he put his imagination to work? The lesson of Joe Biden is, go big or go home.
Yes, in a bizarre way lunch bucket Joe is a political role model. Joe Biden is a man who used to hang out with a train conductor on Amtrak even years after the conductor was dead, and as a senator, spent his Saturday mornings at the local Home Depot getting items to do his home repairs. And he grew up in Wilmington, DE, and Scranton, PA, while talking over the dinner table with his father who, according to his father’s obituary, owned an airport and crop dusting service on Long Island while apparently living in, yes, Nassau County. It all comes full circle, and if you can pull this off, you will be a politician, my son.
Yes, it turns out George Santos actually didn’t graduate from Baruch College in the City College of New York system, and he wasn’t on the volleyball team, never mind being a star. And the only way he would have burnt his fingers working on Wall St. was by picking up a lit cigar someone threw to the curb. And no, his claim to be part Jewish in his bid for the not-inconsiderable Jewish vote in Nassau County was, at best, an exaggeration. (Maybe he should do a DNA test like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He might come out as a winner given the huge number of Sephardic Jews who left the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.) And the odds are pretty good he did some stupid things in his teens and twenties.
But the GOP, as usual, is more interested in tearing its own members apart than going after Democrats. In truth, the Nassau County GOP was once a formidable Republican machine. Known then as the Cook County of the East, it had an uncanny ability to find votes as needed. Those days may be gone, but the party is hardly a paragon of virtue. And Congress isn’t exactly a collection of saints. So their sense of shame is very selective. The Nassau County GOP has returned every dollar Santos donated to the party, an unheard-of move. So they are gunning to take him out, and he is starting early to build up a protective war chest against those trying to criminalize his candidacy and knock him out in a primary.
RELATED: BREAKING: George Santos to Step Down From Committee Assignments
The odd thing is the district attorney’s office in Nassau County has something of an unwritten rule that when they find a crooked Republican, they also go looking for a crooked Democrat just to keep the game even. It turns out they don’t have to break a sweat to find members of either party, according to those familiar with the situation. So Democrats and Republicans had better come to this with clean hands, especially if Santos runs as an independent.
The fact is, Congress is full of people who make things up, and if the Republicans want Santos to resign, they should at least demand the Democrats pair this resignation with the resignation of one of their own Joe Biden imitators. No need to expect Biden or Kamala Harris, who has her own legacy of exaggerations, to step down. A pawn for a pawn should be a minimum demand. There is a long list of Democrats in Congress who have gilded the lily and even gotten rich while in office under questionable circumstances. Until their heads are also presented on a platter, Santos should stay in office, and Republicans need not shy away from Santos’s reelection campaign. He already seems ready for a fight.
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