A Final Farewell to the Only Honest Man in Congress
George Santos, we hardly knew ye (probably).
A few weeks ago at the bar, I got into a classic argument about American politics with an acquaintance. We were talking about George Santos, the short-lived and much-loved Republican representative of New York’s 3rd Congressional District. In his brief time in office, Santos was implicated in an almost unceasing cavalcade of scams, crimes, and scandals, eventually forcing his colleagues to oust him from the House. I said, right off the bat, that I loved him. He was special to those of us with a bleak, cynical view of the American government: a shining and in some ways honest—if only because he was so brazen and inept—example of the everyday corruption and moral vacancy that most of our elected representatives share.
The acquaintance didn’t agree. She thought taking a flippant view of Santos’s crimes didn’t absolve their perpetrator from moral condemnation. She did not want to laugh at George Santos—she was angry he ever held office in the first place, and couldn’t wait to see him gone.
And now, at long last, he is. Democrat Tom Suozzi won Santos’s seat in a special election on Tuesday, beating an ultra-Zionist mega-Maga Republican named Mazi Pilip, denying the GOP a chance to hold on to a crucial swing district for the next few months, and giving them the incumbent advantage when Suozzi has to win the seat for real in November. If you’re keeping score, this is a good thing. Electoral wins for the less-evil party in Congress are good, insofar that they are less bad than the alternative. My acquaintance was right — she has always been right. And yet, I just can’t shake that Santos nostalgia.
Part of this is how the Democrats won back NY-3. Suozzi, a longtime fixture in the state’s political scene, beat his opponent, a vaguely batty MAGA disciple with a wild personal story1, by outflanking her from the right: leaning into the panic over the Biden administration’s migrant policy and saying that he at least had better ideas to fix it than Pilip’s vague hysterics, as well as claiming that he would stand up to the evil leftists from inside the Democratic party itself. This strategy—portray Democrats as tougher on crime and immigration than their opponents and run a mile from the floundering incumbent president—is as cynical and depressing as they come. Already, the national party is taking note.
If he wins again in November, Suozzi’s vote will likely be an important one if the Democrats manage to regain the House majority. But if we wake up in January and the Democratic majority is chock full of Joe Manchin-like “Democrats” who are determined to run as far right as they need to retain their seat, we’ll be only marginally better off than we were with Santos in charge. It’s almost enough to make you miss him—if only because he was an constant reminder of what a liability the amoral conservative movement is to people who generally want to be good to one another. I liked having that, to some extent: a bumbling, corrupt fool, whose antics were so cartoonish that he inspired ridicule instead of fear and disgust, unlike some of the more overtly violent bigots the GOP has elected to office.
What I liked most, though, was that Santos paradoxically made me feel sane. Politicians spend the majority of their careers trying to burnish and shine their image for an optimistic public that wants to believe the people they’re voting for have their best interests at heart. Spend long enough engaging with politics, and the people in it, however, and you begin to realize that it’s George Santoses all the way down. Staffers and advisers and politicians themselves are often married to lobbyists from special interest firms, they make questionable stock trades ahead of major government announcements all the time, and their policies shift and bend as much as the borders of their constantly gerrymandered districts. It was nice in some ways to have one guy who was so bad at hiding this that he had to lean in. That, I think, is the real reason his colleagues kicked him out of the House. When it came down to it, he was too honest of a crook to make a living in Washington.
Ethiopian Orthodox Jew airlifted to Israel by Operation Solomon in the early 90s, married an American, inspired to run for office by October 7th, etc.
Jack, I think you are right and your friend is wrong. George Santos was not serious about policy and was not introducing bad legislation, just voting for it. Suozzi will introduce bad things, vote for bad things and block even the possibility of good things if Democrats get a 2/3 House majority. When you say, "Joe Manchin-like “Democrats” who are determined to run as far right as they need to retain their seat"-- that's not why they're running right. Many "left" positions are popular. Over 60% of independents and 80% of Democrats want a ceasefire. They don't run right because it wins elections. They run right because they are going to enact right wing policy, which is what they believe in. It's a signal that the electorate has no real options on policy for the most part. He's not a lesser evil. He's an evil consensus machine with lesser evil branding.
I think what we should learn from Mazi Pilip is that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel should declare the Palestinians presumptively Jewish so that thirty years from now Palestinian American congressional candidates can run on batshit anti-immigrant platforms like their Zionist counterparts can today.
(I say “presumptively Jewish” to as an observation that most Palestinians have never personally converted to any religion and as such should not be considered converts from Judaism. Such converts would, of course, be their very distant ancestors, but the Israeli Supreme Court has previously held that ancestral—well, parental—conversion should not be held against anyone else attempting to make Aliyah.)