Viewing the World · American Democracy | After more than two months, the U.S. House of Representatives is finally going to check scandalous congressmen
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, March 4 (Xinhua) — The Ethics Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives announced on the 2nd the establishment of a subcommittee to investigate Republican Congressman George Santos from New York State who has been involved in a scandal of falsifying his resume.
At this point, more than two months have passed since the US media first exposed the Santos scandal.
Investigation and punishment measures “mild”
The Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives is composed of 5 members from each party of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. On February 28, it was unanimously agreed that 2 members from each party should be selected to form a 4-member subcommittee to investigate Santos. The investigation includes: whether there were illegal activities during the 2022 congressional midterm election campaign; whether personal financial information was concealed from the House of Representatives; whether it violated federal laws related to conflicts of interest by associating with a trust service company; whether it had sexually harassed a job applicant.
However, the House Ethics Committee issued a statement on the 2nd emphasizing: “The establishment of the investigative subcommittee does not in itself mean that any violations have occurred.”
According to the Associated Press, once the misconduct of a congressman is found, the House Ethics Committee can take disciplinary measures such as issuing reprimand letters and fines. The most severe form of punishment is to recommend expulsion, but this has only happened five times in the 200-year history of the United States. . In order to expel a member of the House of Representatives, at least two-thirds of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives need to be supported.
According to the New York Times, the House Ethics Committee has often been criticized for being slow to move forward with similar investigations, with few disciplinary options. The exact timetable for the investigation is not yet known.
According to the Washington Post, federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York are also investigating Santos, and the American Campaign Legal Center has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission to investigate Santos.
Public opinion “bombed” for more than two months
In response to the House Ethics Committee statement, Santos’ office simply said that Santos would “fully cooperate with the investigation.”
Santos, a 34-year-old self-described gay and Brazilian immigrant, will be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in the November 2022 midterm congressional elections. Since December, there have been constant reports from the media that Santos has fabricated his academic qualifications, work experience, and life experience, and is suspected of defrauding others of money… His “list of lies” is getting longer and longer.
Santos later admitted to falsifying his resume: he never studied at New York University, Baruch College, nor worked in two major banks, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
For more than two months, Santos has been repeatedly “bombed” by public opinion. Democrats and Republicans have called on him to resign voluntarily, or urged the House of Representatives to fire him.
According to a poll released by Sienna College in the United States on February 27, 66% of voters in New York State believe that Santos should resign, which is 7 percentage points higher than the previous January.
However, with the support of the senior members of the Republican Congressional Caucus, Santos resisted the pressure of public opinion from all sides, only admitted to falsifying his resume, but vowed never to break the law and refused to resign. He even once joined two relatively unpopular committees in the House of Representatives, and finally announced his withdrawal under verbal criticism.
According to the Associated Press, the most difficult problem facing Santos is probably that his personal finances are not “clean”. When he ran for parliament for the first time in 2020, his declared annual income was only US$55,000, but his personal assets “surged” last year. U.S. dollar deposits, owns an apartment in Brazil with a market value of $1 million. He himself spent $705,000 on the campaign, nearly a quarter of his total campaign fundraising.
According to the “New York Times” report, Santos’s campaign funds are often unaccounted for, and a sum of US$365,000 is missing. He also embezzled funds raised to pay rent for himself.
No one can be trusted in the “post-shame era”
Such a person who is full of lies has been repeatedly defended by top Republicans such as Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy. However, as the scandal continued to ferment, McCarthy and others gradually changed their caliber.
McCarthy previously said that only voters are eligible to decide whether Santos will stay in the 2024 congressional elections, and then “throw the pot” to the House Ethics Committee, saying that the latter will determine Santos’ future. Recently, McCarthy stated that he found it “somewhat difficult” to support Santos for re-election.
The Republican Party occupies the “majority” position in the House of Representatives with only a slight advantage of about 10 seats. According to Reuters, Santos represented the New York State Congress’s third district, which originally leaned toward the Democratic Party, but was “overturned” by the Republican Party in last year’s mid-term elections. It was the “surprise” victory of Santos and others that allowed the Republican Party to control the House of Representatives. Republicans worry that if Santos leaves, his seat will fall to Democrats in a by-election, weakening an already slim seat advantage.
Santos admitted in an interview last month that he was a “terrible liar,” but that pressure from societal expectations, “the political establishment and culture of New York State” made him make a “stupid” decision to lie.
American political scientist Lara Brown recently pointed out in a podcast program on National Public Radio that American politics has gotten rid of the shackles of shame and entered a “post-shame era”; abandoning “shame” will gradually make a person or a country “corrupt”. “Bad”, the victim is the entire American political system and the credibility of Washington.
For some voters in New York state, this statement is true. The US “Politics” website found in December last year that some Republican supporters believed that Democrats were “less credible” than Santos, and they would rather send “liars” like Santos to Congress. (ocean)
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