Even as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene leaps to his defense, George Santos, the putatively incoming congressman representing Long Island’s Third District, isn’t getting the kid glove treatment from all of his Republican colleagues.
After Mr. Santos was exposed last week in a New York Times article as having made numerous false statements on his résumé and about his life story, Representative Nicholas LaLota, newly elected in the First District, said in a statement Tuesday that while he, like other House Republicans, is “eager to be sworn in and focus on our commitment to America and our respective districts,” he had heard from countless Long Islanders expressing “how deeply troubled they are by the headlines surrounding George Santos.”
Mr. LaLota added that as a Navy veteran “who campaigned on restoring accountability and integrity to our government,” he believed a full investigation by the House Ethics Committee, “and, if necessary, law enforcement, is required.”
New Yorkers, he said, “deserve the truth, and House Republicans deserve an opportunity to govern without this distraction.”
On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Santos said he had graduated from Baruch College, that his mother was a Holocaust survivor, that he had worked for Goldman Sachs, and that friends of his had been killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., among other false statements that a bare-majority Republican-led Congress now has to grapple with as swearing-in day on Tuesday approaches.
After initially blaming “the left” for his woes, Mr. Santos took to the right-leaning NewsCorp outlet over the weekend to admit that, yes, he had embellished his résumé, but he excused himself because “we do stupid things in life.”
Every indication is that much of the Republican Party is willing to give Mr. Santos a pass, given the fragile state of the party’s majority, to say nothing of that of the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who is struggling to cobble together the votes he needs to ascend to the speakership.
Mr. Santos was last spotted by news media moving into his sister’s place in the Third District, after it was also revealed that he had run for office in New York while living in Florida.
