Democrats getting kicked off committees a George Santos cautionary tale
W. James Antle III
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The controversy over the removal of Democrats from their committee assignments ought to be a cautionary tale for President Joe Biden’s party on how to handle Rep. George Santos (R-NY).
Whether you believe Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) are the worst people to ever serve in Congress or the second coming of Sam Rayburn, it was inevitable that once Democrats (with some GOP support) removed them from their committees, this would be done to controversial Democrats once Republicans regained the majority.
There is a case on the merits to be made against Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA), as well as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-IL), whose committee assignment change is still pending. There is a case against Greene and Gosar.
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Whether you find those cases compelling or morally equivalent, the idea that breaking the precedent that parties regulate their own members’ committee assignments would be a one-time thing was always as improbable as Harry Reid’s detonation of the nuclear option never being repeated by Mitch McConnell.
If parties refuse to regulate their own members, the voters can hold them accountable. Or not. That’s democracy.
Democrats likely don’t have the votes to expel Santos from Congress, even with some GOP support. They are, also with some GOP support, trying to hound him out of office.
Santos is a Stephen Glass-level fabulist. It can easily be argued that he is unfit to serve. The only question is whether that judgment belongs to the House or his own constituents.
“It is up to the Republican conference, who have to decide what they owe the American people,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters last week. “It is their decision to make on what it means — what they see, as it relates to the terms of standards and service. They have to decide that. It is their conference. He is part of their conference, clearly.”
This is a fallback option for Democrats: If they don’t have the votes to kick Santos out of Congress, they can shame Republicans for not doing it themselves. Each conference should therefore be judged by its least honest or ethically defensible member.
But the precedent is important. People frequently lie to get elected. Santos is a more prolific, comprehensive, and absurd liar than most. There is perhaps no one who comes close to matching him. But other people have lied about far more consequential matters than their rugby team membership.
People running for office should not lie, either about their resumes or policy positions. That is an important political norm. If the primary enforcement mechanism for that norm is going to be the opposite political party in Congress, however, rather than the voters, lines would have to be drawn as to where it would end.
These discussions aren’t happening in a vacuum. The Republican majority is small. So was the Democratic majority it replaced. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) needed Santos’s vote to obtain the gavel. Lawmakers who argue it is their right to decide who is fit to serve in Congress may have motives besides upholding honesty in politics.
Why not go after members of Congress who break their campaign promises? Or who said if you like your doctor or health plan, Obamacare would allow you to keep it? Or who claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Or who voted for tax increases after pledging they would not?
One can argue that these examples are not deliberate deceptions like Santos’s. Some of them involved matters that are or were in dispute. But those are the gray areas in which politics operate. It is easy to imagine a Democrat arguing that a Republican who was elected on fighting inflation was telling a lie if the Republican subsequently votes to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act.
That is certainly less clear-cut than Santos’s various fantasies. But is there anything in, say, the last 36 years of Supreme Court confirmation battles that suggests political escalations always end where lawmakers expect?
Santos may be an extreme outlier. The Democrats who stripped Greene and Gosar of their committee assignments in the last Congress thought the same of those two Republicans. Now it is easy enough to imagine the committee assignments of any controversial rank-and-file lawmaker becoming a campaign issue, at the least. There are already state parties calling for Omar to be booted from Congress.
The cleanest way to adjudicate these matters is for the voters to decide who is worthy of being in Congress and the parties to determine their own committee assignments, subject to electoral rebuke if they fail to discipline their members.
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Santos may be unique. Slippery slope arguments don’t always prove true.
But if Democrats haven’t thought through a limiting principle, they should.