These kind of cases drag on. So I don’t know there were be a special electionj.
But probably? OK. What’s that probability?
Wishful thinking is that it isn’t really a swing district – Santos got incredibly lucky. But we know for a fact that a good GOP candidate can win the district. And I think we know for a fact that Santos isn’t a good one any more.
As for the sometimes-implied idea that it makes the GOP look bad when one of their politicians goes to jail, I don’t recall Democrats going into decline in the Philadelphia area after it repeatedly happened to them.
I predict a vote that falls entirely along party lines: 213 to expel, 221 or 222 to not expel (depending on whether Santos himself is allowed to vote).
Edit: I see, in the Roll Call article, that there are 60 Republican co-sponsors to the resolution to hold the expulsion vote. Maybe the GOP will surprise me.
Still, it puts the Republicans on record that they want Santos counted among their numbers and stand beside him in his criminal behavior.
That won’t put off their base, but at least it’s out there in black and white for anyone with a functional sense of ethics and three working brain cells.
It’s most likely Republicans will attempt to table the resolution or refer it to the Ethics Committee, which would avoid then having to vote up-or-down on the resolution itself. Either maneuver would require a majority vote so they’d need to hold almost all their members.
If the 60 GOP Representatives who co-sponsored the resolution all voted to expel, as well as the 213 Democratic Representatives, that’d give 273 votes, which would be just a smidge less than the 290 needed for a 2/3 majority.
About 2/3 of the way down the article (assuming you and I are looking at the same article; I’m looking at the article to which flurb linked in post #86):
Not meant to be a reply to kenobi_65, but not sure how to edit that out:
Past practice is that members are only expelled after conviction (and then only if they refuse to resign at that time).
As noted by previous posters, this expulsion vote will probably fail.
Then, the next time a Democratic member is indicted, the GOP will use this precedent to try to expel the innocent-until-proved-guilty Democrat, and say Democrats are hypocrites.
And the Republicans will be correct about that.
As for it being really, really obvious that Santos is guilty, based on newspaper reporting, the same was true when my congressperson Chaka Fattah was arrested. That was no reason to override my vote for him about ten years ago.
I’m really at a loss as to why we should give up classic liberal principle in return for — nothing.
Slight difference though - Santos is already admitted to falsifying his credentials, background and the like. Those alone should have been enough to have the Republicans expel him in a more sane day and age. The allegations of additional wrongdoing are icing on the cake at this point: had he (or the Republican party) felt beholden to any ethics, he would have long since been removed.
So, no, calling them out on his admitted actions alone should have been enough and while it won’t be effective in removing him, keeping his issues that he confessed to openly in the news over and over and over again may be a non-zero gain.
Slight difference, yes – if any. If I took a couple weeks and went through the history of the dozens of members of congress who have been convicted of crimes, surely I could show that Santos isn’t the first to make pre-trial admissions of wrongdoing while claiming innocence of what the indictment charges.
In the entire history of the United States, no House member has been expelled except for treason where they couldn’t be tried due to having fled to the confederacy in 1861, or due to refusal to resign after a felony conviction.
Aside from the disrespect of the liberal principle of allowing the trial to go forward with minimal prejudgments, this is a Democratic own-goal. Next time a Democratic member is indicted for bribery, as, given human fraility and the large number of members, will happen, the Democrats will be, because of this precedent, accused of not caring about bribery due to wanting to wait for trial. The correct answer to such an accusation – we care about bribery, but care more about due process – will ring hollow, at least to me.
P.S. As I wrote above - “No House Member.” Senator Blount was sort-of expelled in 1797 due to a letter from him, being found, that sounded like treason. I’d say that was also an unnecessary violation of the innocent-until-proven guilty principle.