Have the Republicans lost their marbles?

Perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve seen Republican congressmen do in my entire long life was their vote to expel former U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) from their fellowship. One doesn’t have to admire Santos’ character or excuse his con games to recognize he was no less worthy of his former post than many Democrats who remain in Congress.

Is Santos really more reprehensible than that black racist demagogue Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who, about a week before he left for a pro-Hamas demonstration, managed to trip the fire alarm in a U.S. Capitol office building? From the video made public of the incident, Bowman committed his criminal act quite deliberately and did it apparently to keep the House from agreeing on a temporary budget bill that would avert a shutdown. Bowman was eager to bring about a shutdown to punish “racist” Republicans. He therefore acted in a blatantly criminal fashion, endangering the lives of his colleagues.

The Democrats are a serious, ruthless force who will break any rule or protect any miscreant to hold onto and expand their power.

Of course, nothing happened to our alarm-tripping black radical except for a slap on the wrist and an inconvenient censure. When Republicans finally voted to censure him, they could only pull along three Democrats. This came after the Democrats spent weeks trying to block even a minimal recognition of Bowman’s outrageous behavior.

House Democrats also allowed their colleague Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) to remain chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, even after revelations that Swalwell was having an affair with a Chinese spy. The Democrats have also more recently blocked any attempt to discipline Swalwell for his misbehavior.

Were Santos’ actions so singularly shameful that they surpassed the sleazy behavior of many of his colleagues, such as Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who is only one of our morally compromised Democratic solons? Charlie Kirk has devoted a recent podcast to the timely theme of “why expelling the clown George Santos is dumber than usual for Republicans.”

Self-destructive righteousness

Such activities may be driven partly by a need to overcompensate for the way the media depict Republican politicians, namely as mean-spirited, ultra-partisan right-wingers. This may drive Republicans into engaging periodically in unseemly virtue-signaling and constant jabbering about finding “common ground” with the left. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine has mocked the 105 Republican congressmen who “were suckered by moral vanity” into cutting their own throats.

Although I wouldn’t discount Trump’s vanity or verbal intemperance, it is to his credit that, unlike most congressional Republicans, this populist hero doesn’t indulge in self-destructive righteousness.

I won’t hold my breath until the Democrats start dumping their own clowns in a spasm of moral righteousness or in order to disarm media critics. The Democrats are a serious, ruthless force who will break any rule or protect any miscreant to hold onto and expand their power. I may loathe their politics, but I profoundly admire their relentless pursuit of what they want.

Democrats could easily dump Bowman, Menendez, and other lowlifes in their party without risking seats. Such tarnished pols could be easily replaced by their ideological and even gender or ethnic look-alikes. But why make such concessions from their position of power? Let the other side fall on its sword. That’s not how the Democrats act.

What was done to Santos was for Republicans the height of folly. The Long Island district that he represented, mostly in Nassau County, will almost certainly go back to the Democrats. Meanwhile the thin majority that the GOP now holds in the House will become even more sliver-like. Since former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has already announced that he plans to depart at the end of the year, this will shrink the Republican voting margin to just three. If Republicans are now having problems trying to assert their will in a predominantly Democratic Congress, try doing it with an even narrower majority.

What Santos was good for

It’s truly astonishing that the 105 morally vain Republicans who voted to oust Santos didn’t reflect more deliberately on the continued value of the person they were dumping. As Devine reminds us, Santos “had the most conservative voting record of the entire New York delegation.” Too bad he was thrown to the wolves, with the approval of his less conservative New York colleagues.

The only silver lining here is that 112 Republican members of Congress voted against Santos’ expulsion. One of the more outspoken “no" votes came from Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who believed the expulsion of Santos “goes against the principles of our institutions.” Donalds may have been referring to the embarrassing fact that Congress, including his Republican colleagues, voted to expel a member who has yet to be convicted in a court of law.

This further underscores the rashness of those Republicans who voted to oust Santos. They took selective action against a conservative-voting GOP congressman who has rallied consistently to his party’s tiny majority. Further, they opted to expel Santos even before he was tried and formally found guilty of any misdeed. Shame on such moral posturing!