The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), making him the sixth lawmaker to face expulsion from the lower chamber in its roughly 200 year history.
Over 300 representatives voted to expel Santos, including 105 members of his own party. The vote required a two-thirds majority to pass.
Prior to the vote, Santos warned his expulsion would set “a very dangerous precedent.”
“In history, five members of Congress have been expelled. All five had suffered convictions in a court. All five had due process. This expulsion vote simply undermines and underscores the precedent that we’ve had in this chamber. It starts and puts us in a new direction – a dangerous one that sets a very dangerous precedent for the future,” Santos said.
“Are we to now assume that one is no longer innocent until proven guilty? And they are in fact guilty until proven innocent? Or are we now to simply assume that because somebody doesn’t like you, they get to throw you out of your job? Or better more, does the Constitution bare no consequence where a duly elected member of the House of Representatives is elected by the general public, but then a couple of politicians decide that they don’t like that person?” he added.
Santos is facing 23 federal charges over alleged fraud, money laundering, misused campaign funds, aggravated identity theft and lies about his personal finances on House disclosure reports. The GOP congressman has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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“Representative Santos’ congressional campaigns were built around his backstory as a successful man of means: a grandson of Holocaust survivors and graduate from Baruch College with a Master’s in Business Administration from New York University, who went on to work at Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, owned multiple properties, and was the beneficiary of a family trust worth millions of dollars left by his mother, who passed years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a result of long-term health effects related to being at one of the towers,” a report by the House Ethics Committee stated last month.
“No part of that backstory has been found to be true,” it added.
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