George Who?
With a new congress comes new problems. The member representing NY-3 is not who he has made himself out to be.
A presidential incumbent’s party usually gets decimated in the midterm following a presidential victory. When Democrats lost the House and maintained control of the Senate during the 2022 elections, it was viewed as a huge victory. After the celebrations drew to a close at country-wide Democratic offices, an election autopsy was conducted. Many high-ranking Democrats looked at the major losses they suffered in New York State. Had Democrats not sustained such heavy losses, they would have maintained The House of Representatives. New York State has long been a stronghold for Democratic politics. Democrats have controlled the State Senate since 2019 and dominated the State Assembly for decades. The concentration of single-party power is noteworthy. The last Republican governor, George Pataki, last held office in 2006, a long time ago.
New York is comprised of 27 congressional districts, and until election night, a mere eight of those were represented by Republicans. Now there are 12 Republicans. Had Democrats kept those four seats, the balance of power in The House of Representatives would register D217 – R218 instead of the current D213 – R222. The irony and anomaly of one of the flipped seats went to the first openly gay non-incumbent GOP candidate elected to Congress to represent New York’s 3rd district, George Santos.
At first glance, this appeared to be a major win for the Republican Party. One of their candidates made significant inroads in a Democratic stronghold. Flipping seats that have historically gone way is almost always necessary to gain a majority. The process can be extremely taxing in time, resources, and effort. Santos flipped the seat NY-3, a district that includes parts of the North Shore of Long Island and Long Island communities like Roslyn, Massapequa Park, and Great Neck. It is the wealthiest congressional district in New York State and among the most affluent nationally.
Unfortunately for the citizens of NY-3, the Republican Party, and Democracy generally, everything about “George Santos” is fake, including possibly his very name. It is just one lie in a dizzying network of falsehoods that went mostly undetected during Santos’s election campaign. As recently as four years ago, Santos introduced himself publicly as “Anthony Devolder,” a combination of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name. In the last couple of weeks, Santos’s endless lies have entered the national spotlight.
Santos has lied about almost everything; what little remains as truth seems to be shrinking daily. New York records show that in 2019, George Santos divorced a woman named Uadla Santos, just weeks before he announced his first congressional campaign in 2020. Santos claimed he was “openly gay” and never had a problem with his sexual orientation. During his campaign, Santos bragged about a robust career that he claimed began when he earned a degree from Baruch College and a further degree from New York University. He then went on to have a tremendous financial career at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. None of the previously mentioned institutions have records of Santos’ employment or graduation. We know that Santos was employed by a financial firm called Harbor City, which the SEC accused of running a Ponzi scheme and was later shut down.
On a personal level, Santos claimed his mother was Jewish and a maternal grandmother who fled the Holocaust to Brazil from Ukraine during WWII. Santos told voters he practiced Catholicism; he was a non-observant Jew, more lies. Santos claimed he was a volleyball star as well. One of the riskier lies that Santos told revolves around his finances. Just three or four years ago, Santos earned a salary of $55,000 with unpaid debts to his name. Despite this, he lent approximately $700,000 to his own political campaign. Unfortunately, it is still unclear where this money came from as federal and local prosecutors investigate the lies told.
The voters of NY-3 were tricked into electing a con man. The media failed to uncover many of Santos’s lies during his campaign in which a fraudster now holds a seat in Congress. It would take a two-thirds vote from other house members to oust Santos. Given McCarthy’s weakness as a leader and the slim majority that the GOP holds in The House, it’s unlikely Santos will be going anywhere. McCarthy has already named Santos to two committees, solidifying his position in a Republican Party that has grown accustomed to lying about its members and policy agenda.
Santos should be thrown out of The House of Representatives and heavily investigated for perpetrating such a level of fraud. Santos has lied about everything down to his name to gain his position. Congress should not welcome or keep anyone who secures membership through nefarious means. If you are interested in seeing more of Santos’s lies, you can find them online by simply googling his “name”.
How did the Democrats NOT find all this dishonesty and prevarication prior to the election and use it to bury this clown?