George Santos and the Fate of the House GOP
A Failure of Leadership from Beginning to End
Disclaimer: Due to the continuous failure of Kevin McCarthy to win the election for Speaker of the House, the number of ballots referred to in this post will likely be out of date soon. This post will be updated periodically to reflect the correct number of failed votes.
As I write, the once-future Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has experienced a massive humiliation at the hands of the radical House members he empowered. After the second vote for Speaker, the first such vote in exactly 100 years, McCarthy had for a second time failed to win even a plurality of the vote, gaining this dubious distinction at the hands of Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The Democrats have grabbed their popcorn out of glee at the spectacle.
Seeking to confirm the hypothesis that the excess of hair product that Representative Matt Gaetz uses had seeped into his brain, this Florida Man who is best friends with a sex trafficker decided to spearhead an effort to take McCarthy’s political scalp. Working with such luminaries as Representative Boebert, Andy Biggs (who helped organize the January 6th rally turned seditious mob), and Paul Gosar (whose own family says he’s not fit to serve), Gaetz seeks to be a kingmaker.
Among their demands of McCarthy were guarantees of committee slots for the Gaetz caucus, committee chairmanships, guaranteed floor votes for certain motions (for some admittedly wise policies like a balanced budget, single-issue bills, and the like), and the right for any House member to bring a motion to vacate the Speakership.
In other words, McCarthy was given a choice between being Speaker in-name-only, or out of House leadership entirely. Sensing that he might have at least a particle of dignity remaining, he chose to face a floor vote. Humiliation followed.
Not just once but fourteen times (see disclaimer). For the first vote, he trotted out his most esteemed surrogate, GOP House Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, to nominate him. It must have seemed appropriate that only someone with an equal lack of core principles and perhaps exceeding him in craven ambition would be up to the task. She is, of course, more than likely whipping votes for herself in the background and sharpening a political knife that will find its way into her patron’s back.
Machiavellian operators with little charisma stand no chance against a determined group of attention-seeking grandstanders. Her nomination failed to make an impression. What about option 2? That was to drive a wedge into the Freedom Caucus by nominating one of its leaders, Representative Jim Jordan, the honorable member for ignoring assaults. Perhaps he could wrestle the holdouts into submission?
It was not to be. In fact, after Jim Jordan presented the nomination of Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, Matt Gaetz presented the nomination of Jim Jordan for Speaker. The case for installing someone of unquestionable moral integrity like Jordan in lieu of a craven, unprincipled leader like McCarthy could hardly have been made better.
Subsequent votes fared no better. But the show must go on. Immediately upon losing his 5th vote, within seconds McCarthy was once again nominated to be Speaker of the House. If one were to photoshop the beleaguered Republican leader as Wile E. Coyote and the speaker gavel as a roadrunner, and repeated failed votes as an ACME company brick wall, you would have the perfect analogy.
The Republicans needed a compromise candidate, and they could do no worse than the former 20-term Speaker and Purple Heart recipient George Santos. The brilliant Nobel Prize recipient and the world’s richest man would be the perfect candidate to bring the Republican caucus together behind the most perfect distillation of its essence.
Most of the present fiasco can be attributed to the Republican’s complete moral degradation. It’s a classic example of the downstream consequences of ignoring ethics and morality in the pursuit of power. It is the ultimate slippery slope, where small compromises build up slowly and you end up left with something utterly unrecognizable.
It began with the conservative media cottage industry. Many people make a lot of money by making sensational claims of censorship and promoting a conspiratorial mindset. Simply say something outrageous that appears to defy authority, and people of a contrarian mindset will shower you with attention, subscriptions, and clicks, which converts into advertising revenue, product sales, and self-promotion.
Newt Gingrich was the first speaker to openly utilize this approach, generating media soundbites as a partisan flamethrower seeking to impose a conservative Contract with America. The result, four years later, was Gingrich’s resignation, a failed impeachment, and the complete triumph of Bill Clinton’s third-way politics. In the conservative media sphere, however, Gingrich was a hero, as media soundbites became a poor substitute for conservative policy victories.
The Republican party could not escape the orbit of the conservative media after this failure, and its gravity sucked the party further and further in until it folded in on itself and became a universe of its own, completely detached from the concerns of the voting public. 18 years later, this funhouse political universe presented as its emissary Donald J Trump.
Trump elevated lying to an art, while still winking at the truth. He told lies to cover up his lies and at least by that mechanism demonstrated a sense of shame. A healthy society imposes some level of stigma against lying so that it’s in someone like Trump’s best interest to at least try to conceal it.
Enter George Santos, who is a class unto himself, a pathological extravaganza of fibs and false personas that make one stop and stare in amazement. He has elevated the lie to the form of high artistic expression, raising it to a standard that other mere mortals can only hope to reach. George Santos’ mug would rightfully be emblazoned forever in English dictionaries next to the entry for “fabulist”. This bi-racial, gay, Jewish, Brazilian with a Slavic family name, degrees from schools he never attended, money from jobs he never held, and a strangely magnetic attraction to holidays in Moscow, is certainly a spectacle for the ages.
The difference between Santos and Donald Trump is one of degree and not of kind. Santos lies are distinguished by their pathology and utter disregard for shame. Lies now have no stigma, how could they once you decide they don’t matter for your party’s leader? Nassau County Chair for the GOP refused to denounce Santos, saying that he could atone for his sins once in office by passing Republican policies. Remember, it’s policies that count, not ethics because a leader’s ethics don’t matter. You can trust the leader at this word because he says the things we want to hear.
And there is the rub: Republicans made a deal with the devil that any moral transgression would be ignored for the great moral cause of building a “conservative” majority, installing conservative judges, and passing supposedly “conservative” policies. What this amounted to is up to interpretation. But what is clear is a certain amount of blatant moral compromise was allowed for Donald Trump, and now the current crop of new “leaders” is following his example and demanding more.
And so, we devolve to a blatant fabulist becoming the public face of a party without the ability to confront him without the charges of hypocrisy or aiding and abetting the Democratic “enemy”. It appears the GOP will let the Feds do their dirty work for them, with several investigations, even a federal one, being opened against Santos.
As with January 6th, Republican politicians are more than happy to sit back and indulge the worst criminal impulses of its leaders while letting the Democratic-controlled government do the hard work to undermine those leaders and salvage the GOP’s long-term prospects despite themselves. Some Republicans even want to be bailed out of electing a speaker, suggesting that some Democrats could vote present, or for a compromise candidate.
In the short term, this will add to the ongoing GOP disaster of being unable to elect a Speaker, saddled with a candidate who has repeatedly debased himself to become speaker and thus has no respect dealing with the ongoing criminal legal jeopardy of the Coup Squad and their most recent president. Not only that, but their most viable alternative presidential candidates are busying themselves investigating drag shows, trafficking immigrants across the country, and otherwise alienating everyone who is not a partisan or ideological Republican.
The circular firing squad on display is a systemic failure of a party that has abandoned all pretense of ethics in the pursuit of power. It’s also a fundamental indictment of those who made these compromises and a karmic humiliation. McCarthy and Republican leadership made a cynical calculation to not stand up to Donald Trump and his ilk, betraying the Constitution by effectively endorsing January 6th and excusing a coup attempt.
Despite protests and concerns from Republicans, they have lived down to the reputation of those C.S. Lewis criticized when he wrote “we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”