Kicked Out of the House

For all of George Santos’s incredible accomplishments — first man on the moon, inventor of the microchip, twelve-time People’s Sexiest Man of the Year, etc. etc. — it looks like he’s about to pull of his most impressive accomplishment yet: being so comically corrupt that even Republicans feel he has to be expelled from the House.

I can’t stress how rare this is.

If he’s kicked out, Santos will be the first Republican congressman in American history to be booted from the House and, indeed, only the third representative to be expelled since the onset of the Civil War.

And if we look at the only two expulsions in the last century and a half, we can see just how high the bar is.

The last representative to be kicked out of the House was Rep. Jim Traficant (D-OH), whose fundamental weirdness cannot be overstated.

He wore a toupee that was so bad most people assumed it was a haircut because, honestly, who would pay for that? And he had a habit of signing off his floor speeches in the House of Representatives with a dignified “Beam me up, Mister Speaker!” (Seriously, if you’ve never watched him, please, enjoy the sampling below.)

As colorful as he was in Congress, Rep. Traficant attracted a wide range of complaints during his tenure, with allegations that he’d misused campaign funds and forced his congressional staffers to do work on his Ohio farm.

In 2002, he was finally convicted on charges of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion. The House voted almost unanimously to expel him after the conviction, and he went on to serve seven years in prison.

The only other congressman expelled in the modern era was Rep. Michael Myers (D-PA), who was deeply implicated in the Abscam scandal. Abscam — literally short for “Arab Scam” — was an FBI sting operation in which agents posed as representatives of a Middle Eastern company who bribed politicians for favors. (If you saw the film American Hustle, that was basically it.) Six congressmen and one senator were indicted on bribery charges, and all of them had the good sense to resign. Except Myers.

Myers, who had been caught on tape accepting an envelope stuffed with $50,000 and saying “money talks, bullshit walks” like a bit player from GoodFellas, somehow thought he could beat the rap, but he was still expelled in a 376-30 vote. He was soon convicted and spent three years in prison.

As you can see, the list of those expelled from the House is a real circle of dishonor. And while it includes literal traitors in the distant past, in the last 162 years only the most comically corrupt and incompetent members of Congress have joined their ranks.

Soon-to-be ex-congressman Santos is about to join them, and justly so.