It’s scandal season in Washington. (When isn’t it?) For weeks, the saga of incoming Congressman George Santos from Long Island has been a near-daily revelation and Republican squirm. In a town full of liars, the Republican freshman proves to be truly world-class. His resume is fake. His religion is a lie. It now appears clear that he was not the grandson of Holocaust survivors. (Well, he said, when questioned, he meant he was “Jewish,” not Jewish.) He didn’t graduate from college and didn’t work at Goldman Sachs. This week, we learned that he lied about his mother being in the Twin Towers on 9/11. He was even accused of stealing $3,000 from a GoFundMe set up to save the dying dog of a homeless veteran.
There have now been multiple investigations into various unresolved issues, such as Santos being a huge Donald Trump fan who listed no assets to speak of in 2020, yet two years later he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign loans. On Thursday, Andrew Kaczynski, a reporter who went after him for deceit, posted a list Different names that Santos used in his various scams: Anthony Santos; George Santos; Anthony Devold; George Anthony Devold; George Devold; George ad Santos; Anthony Zab Rowski; George Anthony Santos-DeWolde. A con man, the 34-year-old may or may not have had an alternate life as a drag queen in Brazil, putting even Trump and his John Barron routine to shame.
But, because politics is what it is, House Republicans have decided to make him a congressman no matter what. This week, despite the new revelations, they offered him two committee assignments, the small business and science, space and technology panels. The reason is simple: The new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has a razor-thin majority and can’t afford to lose Santos’ votes. In McCarthy’s view, Santos is an issue for the people of New York’s Third Congressional District to deal with in the next election.
The bigger problem, from McCarthy’s perspective, was that the Santos scandal distracted attention from all the other scandals —Democratic Scandals – Republicans hope to use the considerable power brought by their new control of the House of Representatives in 2023 to focus political attention on these scandals. Call it revenge, or revenge, or just politics as usual. Their list of targets included what it called the “weaponization” of conservatives against Trump and the FBI, Justice Department and other parts of the federal government. According to Republican hard-liners, it was a conspiracy so widespread they demanded that McCarthy commit an entire subcommittee to it in exchange for their support in the speaker’s race. Other investigations in the name of congressional oversight could provide troubling scrutiny of the Biden administration’s botched troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, its enforcement of border policy and its handling of Afghanistan. Coronavirus-19 pandemic.
Also in the spotlight is one of Trump’s 2020 campaign obsessions: Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has become synonymous with another sweeping GOP conspiracy involving the president’s son, Alleged Ukrainian and Chinese influence peddling, alleged cover-ups by free media complicity, and various other things that I don’t understand or forget. The obvious goal here isn’t to overthrow the president’s son; it’s to hunt down the president himself. “This is an investigation of Joe Biden,” said James Comer, R-Ky., the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Biden is known to have made himself an even bigger target in the past few weeks when it was revealed that, like Trump, he was storing classified documents at home and at think tank offices after leaving the vice presidency in 2017.This president has mocked his congressional opponents for being “extreme” for being messed up by Trump MAGAExtremists will now have to answer their questions about why his situation is different from Trump’s. Biden decided to lash out at Trump’s behavior during a “60 Minutes” interview last September without first checking whether he too Possibly sitting on some top-secret documents.” How could anyone be so irresponsible? ’ Biden wondered then. How exactly?
In the ten days since news of the classified documents was revealed to the public, neither Biden nor his advisers have done an extremely credible job of answering even basic questions: How many documents were found? Why did it take so long for Biden to find them after leaving office? Why did it take so long to publicly disclose their existence after they were found in searches on November 2 and December 20?For Biden’s interpretation of the status quo, Washington postal The exhaustive report was provided on Thursday and, in my opinion, is long on details but short on convincing excuses. A special counsel for the Justice Department has been appointed to answer those questions more authoritatively — most importantly, whether there was any actual wrongdoing involved, or whether, as Biden’s defenders were quick to assert, simply recklessness and confusion. House Republicans, of course, used the revelations to discredit Biden and the ongoing investigation into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago hideout. Meanwhile, the Democratic response can mostly be summed up in the loud groans I hear whenever the topic comes up. That, and the “how could they be so stupid?” lament.
This Friday marks the second anniversary of Biden’s inauguration as president. For the most part, he has been more bad luck than stupid so far, and his tenure has been riddled with interconnected crises that would sourly test any chief executive — including lingering pandemics, decades-long The highest inflation rates, and a radical Republican refusal to deny Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. For decades, Democrats have worried that conservative justices on the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade and use it to guarantee women’s reproductive freedom. This finally happened under Biden. In Europe, Putin has long threatened Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, but it was at the beginning of Biden’s second year in power that Putin launched the largest ground war in Europe since World War II.
Faced with such a dreary moment, it wasn’t so bad for the always optimistic Biden to emerge from it. Even with a 550-member Senate over the past few years, he has managed to pass a sweeping package of legislation to increase spending on infrastructure, health care and climate change mitigation. He rallied and formed a bipartisan coalition to provide billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. Right now, he’s not facing the threat of a recession.
If anything, Republican overreach offers Biden a political path out of trouble, and the 2022 midterm results are far less catastrophic than expected, at least in part because of the GOP’s insistence on picking the extremists Trump supports Candidates for battleground states. Trump himself has long been the most effective argument for representing the Democratic Party, and the cartoon crook becoming the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, Senate and White House in just four years is There is a reason.
Still, the past few weeks have reminded us that Democrats cannot simply count on Republican excesses in Trump’s name to achieve their goals. Screw it up, screw it up, and Biden’s — whether or not it matters that much to voters, who generally don’t care about the Beltway scandal that plagues us Washingtonians — will at least be reduced to self-inflicted A little bit of political impropriety. The big news in the middle of Biden’s presidency is that he appears determined to run again, no matter how risky it may seem to place the fate of his party and the republic in the hands of a gaffe-prone octogenarian. His opponents are real-life rebels. What if his luck really runs out next time? ♦
