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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia.
N. Rodgers: I have not been expelsed from anything, I know that's not a word. I have not been expelled.
J. Aughenbaugh: Expelled.
N. Rodgers: From anything, in a very long time. I'm very lucky. I wasn't expelled from school because I generally speaking, walked up right to the line from getting expelled, but didn't actually get expelled because my mama would have killed me if I had gotten expelled. But expelling in the Congress means something completely different, doesn't it, than it does in the normal way that we think of as expelling, or does it? You have to get out. That's generally what expelled means. Is it the same thing?
J. Aughenbaugh: For all intents and purposes, it does mean the same thing, Nia. In listeners, this little shorty of a podcast episode and in the news, as they say.
N. Rodgers: In the news.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right. Is about how representative George Santos.
N. Rodgers: If that's really his name.
J. Aughenbaugh: A Republican from New York at the time that we were recording this episode the previous week, he was expelled from the House of Representatives by a not too close vote either by the way, the vote was 311 to 114.
N. Rodgers: Can we talk about 114 but also too, and what I think is more important here is this is not a common thing. The Congress does not rise up and boot its members on any regular basis.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Is that true? This is not a thing that every term you hear about somebody getting expelled or something like that. That's a relatively rare event, is it not?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. This is only the sixth time in the 234-year history of the House of Representatives that a member of the House was expelled.
N. Rodgers: Everybody else was either a confederate or a found guilty criminal. One could argue that everybody in Congress is a criminal in some way or another, but actually, having gone through the court system and been found guilty.
J. Aughenbaugh: A convicted criminal.
N. Rodgers: George Santos has not been convicted of anything yet. He has been, I think, indicted on lots and lots of charges that have to do with how he spent money that he got for his campaigns.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Campaign fraud. He's been indicted on multiple counts of campaign fraud, but the trial has not occurred.
N. Rodgers: We should separate that from the fact that George Santos is known for his lying. He just lies about molecules moving in the air, he lies about everything. But lying is not illegal and lying is not a punishable offense in Congress. It's the fraud.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. The motion to expel him was that he lied on his biography.
N. Rodgers: So he did get in trouble for lying.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is why you asked about the 114 members who voted against expulsion. Almost all of them who responded to press questions indicated that they were concerned about the precedent that was being set.
N. Rodgers: If you boot people for lying, this could get ugly in short order.
J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly members of Congress. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be flippant or suggest that all members of Congress are liars, but those who run for elected office, particularly federal elected office, try to portray themselves in the best light.
N. Rodgers: Many of them gently embellish the edges of their biographies. If they attended Harvard, they may say they graduated from Harvard, which those are two very different things or something like that. There's around the edges an embellishment. He was not just around the edges. His embellishment went out a lot because I could see where they would be worried that, if we're going to start this, this could get out of hand if we're talking about embellishment of your biography.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other concern, particularly, for the Democrats who voted against it because I mean, politically, it is advantageous for the Democratic Party to remove Santos because Santos got elected in a district in New York that previously had elected Democrats. Almost immediately, this is a potential gain of one seat and a very closely divided House of Representatives for the Democrats.
N. Rodgers: Because isn't the actual margin four votes? Some really small number of votes.
J. Aughenbaugh: After Santos, the margin is now down to five. Which means-
N. Rodgers: You just have to peel off
J. Aughenbaugh: Four or five members.
N. Rodgers: Five Republicans and something goes down even though it's a Republican-controlled house.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the Democrats who voted against the expulsion have indicated that they are concerned that this will set a precedent, where expulsion becomes a tool of the majority party in the House that is hoping to get rid of members of the opposition party to increase their potential margin in the body. In current times, I think it's a legitimate concern.
N. Rodgers: I think the other legitimate concern that some of them stated and that I have personally and agree with, is this thwarts the will of the voters. The voters, for whatever reason, sent George Santos to the House of Representatives. He was going to be there for a long time because in two years he would be up for re-election. If they really wanted to be rid of him, if his voters thought that he was a fraud and a fake, and whatever, they would just vote him out. If an opponent can't make a good case for that, then he gets to stay. That's the purpose of democracy. The body decided that it would disenfranchise the voters in his district. I'm not cool with that. I understand them if they had censured him if they had said that dude's a liar. That's something his opponents could use to run against him and maybe that would work and maybe it wouldn't because you know what? Maybe people wouldn't care. They'd say, we don't care, we like him anyway or he did for the District, what we wanted him to do, or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are other punishments. By the way, Santos had already been punished. He had basically been stripped of all of his committee assignments. To a point you just made Nia, the House had already basically made it nearly impossible for Santos to run for re-election next fall and be successful because if you're not on a committee, that means you have no opportunity to propose bills that may be vetted by the committee, voted and approved by the committee, and then sent to the House floor. It's one of those situations to where, like you, in terms of Democratic theory, I'm concerned when the members of the club, the organization known as the House, decide that they're going to ignore what the voters in a particular district in New York decided they wanted for their representation. Who they wanted. That does concern me.
N. Rodgers: It's easy to do when a person is as repugnant as George Santos. It's an easy call. The rest of us have to go, that guy's a schmo why is he still in the Congress? But what if that was Aughie, it's a person who's not a schmo, who's not a liar and a cheat, who maybe embellished a bio. Well, I have a doctorate from Virginia Tech with honors. I know you don't get a doctorate with honors, but you know what I mean. Some embellishment that somebody could land on as, well look, he lied about his bio because they wanted your seat or they wanted to be punishing in some way that's not appropriate. It's easy for us to be okay with it being Santos because he's just so far out in the limb of wow, you don't tell the truth about anything but what happens when it's not a member like that? What happens when a more questionable charge and something stands? I don't like this. I'm not a fan of George Santos. I'm fine with him being booted, he personally, but not the way it was done.
J. Aughenbaugh: Done. To go a little bit further, what if the Republicans decide to target Marjorie Greene? Or the Republicans decide to target an outspoken member of the so-called squad?
N. Rodgers: This can get dangerous quickly.
J. Aughenbaugh: This can get really dangerous, and particularly when you compare Santos to the other members who've been expelled.
N. Rodgers: He is not convicted of a crime yet and may never be.
J. Aughenbaugh: The first three who got expelled; John Clark, John Reid, and Henry Burnett were all members of the Confederacy.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. They were on the losing side, so they got booted.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the case of Clark, for instance, he tried to serve in the House while also serving in the Missouri State Guard after Missouri voted to secede the Union.
N. Rodgers: Things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: Well I mean, he was looking for an income.
J. Aughenbaugh: Burnett tried to maintain his seat in Congress while also being a colonel in the confederate army. You know you don't get to be part of-
N. Rodgers: Of the leaving and part of the state.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right.
N. Rodgers: And those are two highly unprincipled stands. I'm going to cover myself, depending on who wins, by being able to say, oh, I served in the army or I was faithfully serving in Congress. They'd be able to say, oh, that other thing was just me window dressing so that I could say whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: You don't get to be a member of the club while at the same time being part of the force that's trying to destroy the club. The other two were criminals. Michael Jay and his nickname was Aussie Myers was a democratic representative from Pennsylvania who was expelled in 1980. He was one of the members of Congress who got ensnared in the infamous FBI Abscam operation.
N. Rodgers: Oh, we should do an episode about that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Okay.
N. Rodgers: About great FBI operations and what they've done. Oh, yeah, we should do an episode about that. That'll be fun.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because he got expelled about a month after he was found guilty for taking a $50,000 bribe. That was an easy one.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Much like the fifth one. The fifth one is of more recent vintage, James Traficant, who was a Democrat from Ohio. He was expelled three months after a federal jury in Cleveland convicted him of 10 counts of racketeering and bribery in tax evasion.
N. Rodgers: Yeah and the court's lucky he didn't break their knees.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right.
N. Rodgers: I mean Traficant was known with this mafia style.
J. Aughenbaugh: Style. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Existence.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, listeners of the one of the funniest parts of his federal trial was that one part, Traficant received a rebuke from the judge in the case because Traficant referred to the prosecutors as having quote "the testicles of an aunt." Who says that in a federal court trial?
N. Rodgers: People who just don't care anymore. I was going to say something much more rude, but people who just don't care anymore. But what you've pointed to is the criminality involved in all of those folks. We have no actual proof of George Santos' criminality because while we may all be able to see it with our eyeballs, that has not actually been proven in a court of law. What he's done has not been proven to be illegal. We all know it's been proven to be stupid. But stupidity does not get you booted from Congress. If it did, we wouldn't have any Congress. We would just have a big old empty house with a bunch of pages walking around going, I wish I had somebody to work for. I'd be sitting around eating bond bonds, waiting for something to happen, really, because all humans do stupid things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Stupid things.
N. Rodgers: From the moment they wake up in the morning. If you have a day where you get through the whole day without doing something dumb, good for you, go buy a lottery ticket, you're having a great day.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia, to your point, I woke up this morning and I couldn't understand why my coffee maker was not generating coffee, and then I looked in the reservoir and saw that I had failed to put water into the coffee maker last night before I went to bed. Now I'm a person-
N. Rodgers: Who makes coffee approximately 7,000 times a day.
J. Aughenbaugh: -I'm a person with multiple degrees. I might not be the smartest apple in the barrel, but occasionally I bob to the surface, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, even I had a stupid moment there-
N. Rodgers: They're like, oh, no coffee without water. Like who knew actually physics actually works.
J. Aughenbaugh: Shocking revelation. We have elected some really smart people to Congress. They have said some truly stupid things. They have backed some really bad legislation. They have co-sponsored bills where in hindsight they were like, what was I thinking?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. We can't make that the line at which we remove people from Congress because people are human. I don't know. I'm concerned by this not because I'm a fan of Santos, not because I think, and his whataboutism is also not a defense. This idea that everybody does this stuff. Well if everybody else jumped off a cliff in Congress, would you? That's not right. His defense was, oh, you should see this place, and I'm like, no one, I really shouldn't see this place. Or I would move someplace else because I would be so sad. There's some stuff I really don't want to know about what goes on in
Congress. But also that's not an argument either. Like that's not a defense, and he didn't really have, but I just don't like the way it was done. I really feel like this was a non-democratic incredibly biased thing, and I'm not a fan.
J. Aughenbaugh: If a court of law finds him guilty, then, at that point, Congress can go ahead and say, particularly with what he's been indicted for, campaign fraud, which basically indicates that he committed a fraud on the people of his district in New York because otherwise, he more than likely would not have been elected.
N. Rodgers: In which case-
J. Aughenbaugh: Fine. But we're trying to preserve the integrity of the house. No, you're not. Right?
N. Rodgers: Right. You're playing political games.
J. Aughenbaugh: Games.
N. Rodgers: And this guy handed himself to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes on a platter.
N. Rodgers: Which you know, it's not smart on his part.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this goes back to something we've discussed at length, particularly quite a bit of recent vintage is that you have government institutions where the members are using power and authority where they've given very little thought to what might happen in the future and this is one of those instances to where I-
N. Rodgers: This is not a door they should have opened because now it's open.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now it's open, and particularly with who the people have been electing.
N. Rodgers: The other thing is, the likelihood is they could have just waited, and this would have taken care of itself. One, he was probably not going to be reelected in his district. He was already getting a groundswell of people angry in the district who didn't like him and didn't like the way he handled himself. He probably was already not going to be reelected. But even if he was the court case, if it came out against him, would have taken care of this. They are being proactive, and I'm using air quotes, which nobody can see but probably everybody can hear in my voice by being proactive. They have opened the door to future episodes of this where the member is a lot less in question.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the credentials, the behavior is a lot less in question, but they're going to be taken out because of some political machination, political reason. Nia to your point, if the Republican Party wanted to disassociate themselves with Santos, one, they should have never allowed him to be their candidate for that election.
N. Rodgers: They probably should let him sit at the front of the state of the Union. That's what Mitt Romney didn't care for.
J. Aughenbaugh: But run somebody against him in the Republican Party primary next spring. In Democrats, if you vote to expel him, you ought to think long and hard about the fact that you guys ran a candidate about a year and a half ago. Who lost to George Santos?
N. Rodgers: Much rethinking should have been done here.
J. Aughenbaugh: Perhaps you should go ahead and look at who you are running as a candidate for that district. A district by the way, that you guys had been winning for years.
N. Rodgers: Well, and the other thing too, we're going to end on this, something that Aughie and I regularly talk about, and that is be careful about the door you open open because it is likely to smack you in the face at some point. This whole thing of we're going to get rid of the filibuster every time that one side says that, everybody says, all right but when it's your turn to be in the minority, you are going to want the filibuster, you are going to want to be able to put a stop to whatever the majority is doing. Right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Again now we've moved into the territory of expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That is a dangerous place to be. That is a dangerous door to open, and the Democrats that voted for it need to think about that, because their turn will come.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Anyway, like we said, if we're going to start throwing out liars and cheats, the House is going to be about five people, and the Senate's going to be about five people, and nothing will ever do anything, and we won't have a president. At the rate the Supreme Court's going to see our last episode, we might not have one of them either. We just all need to sit down for a minute. Just everybody needs to take a breath.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. All right, thank you, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.