The Risk of Playing by the Rules

The loss by the Republicans last week of one of their precious seats in the House of Representatives reduces their slim majority to near invisibility. It did not have to happen. The vacancy giving rise to the special election in New York’s third congressional district was intentionally created by the Republicans themselves. A cynic might say with opponents like these, the Democrats can stroll through their victory lap. An influential group of Republican congressmen, including the Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee, decided the behavior, or misbehavior, of their erstwhile colleague, George Santos, was unworthy of a Republican congressman. While Democrats and their enablers in the press happily piled on, Mr. Santos would not have been expelled from Congress without the initiative and determination of his fellow Republicans. Rather than taking the easy route of letting the voters decide, keeping Mr. Santos in place till the next election, they decided to do, as the Clintons love to say, the right thing.Applying ethical standards to a fellow congressman of the same party is exceedingly rare. To do so in a way that threatens a tiny, vulnerable majority is almost unheard of. It raises the question: Is it an act of nobility, adherence to that unwritten code of conduct shared by many Americans, or is it an act of political stupidity? Basically, Republicans in the House risked power for principle. Mr. Santos was, essentially, expelled for lying on his resume. He made false claims about his academic achievements and his work experience, a phantom job at Goldman Sachs, not always considered a political winner. He didn’t commit treason or murder. He has yet to be tried, never mind convicted. Yet his expulsion reflected a standard of morality that is not universally shared in Washington. To wit: Elizabeth Warren listed on her resume Native American ancestry. This opened a lot more doors than a fictitious tour at Goldman Sachs. She apologized to the Cherokee nation and is still in the Senate. Congressman Adam Schiff was, for spreading “false accusations” about President Trump, formally censured by the House in a party-line vote of 213 to 209, as the Democrats refused to call him to account. He was escorted by fellow Democrats to the well of the House for the censure to be declared.Senator Menendez has been indicted for assisting a constituent and foreign government in exchange for large sums of money and, hedging the dollar’s demise, some gold bars. Yet so far nary a word about removal except from Senator Fetterman, the emerging ethicist of the Democratic Party.So what’s the difference between Mr. Santos and the others named above? It’s that Mr. Santos is a Republican, the party that forced President Nixon to resign even before the House had a chance to vote for impeachment; the others are Democrats, the party circling the wagons around President Biden.Don’t laugh, but in some cases Republicans seem to uphold certain standards of conduct that we associate with Americans’ shared sense of right and wrong. Maybe they derive from the country’s Judeo-Christian foundations which some of the Founding Fathers thought so important to preserving a viable republic.The Democrats, on the other hand, are clearly the party of end justifies the means. If it meant undermining their power they would no more think of expelling a Santos than they would of impeaching the Biden crime family.The Republicans may have done the virtuous thing but is it such a politically naive principle that it will insure their ultimate defeat?Good question.

The Risk of Playing by the Rules

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