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By Jack Bernard
Bernard is a retired  corporate executive

“That’s what his (Santos’) decision is to make. The voters elected him to serve. If there is a concern, he has to go through the Ethics [Committee]” – Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy 

McCarthy’s incoherent statement about Rep. Santos of NY is purposefully weird and evasive. The voters were totally unaware of the true George Santos due to his lies. 

However, I certainly do understand why McCarthy is not intending to remove Santos, as many GOP legislators have requested. It took McCarthy 15 separate votes to finally become Speaker of the House. And he cannot afford to lose a supporter like Santos, proven compulsive liar or not. 

For those of you who have sworn off Washington for the last few weeks and are unaware, Santos is a Long Island Republican House member. He lied about many things, including where he went to high school and college (he did not even attend Baruch College or NYU), where he worked (he never worked for Goldman-Sachs or Citigroup on Wall Street), his religion (he’s Catholic, not Jewish), his grandparents (they were not holocaust survivors), and his mother’s death (she was not killed on 9/11). So, basically, he lied about his entire life and resume. 

In the meantime, Speaker McCarthy is looking more and more foolish every day. And an impotent House Speaker unable to lead will not last long when a small group of right-wing radicals is set on making him “heel”… or bringing him down if he does not comply 100% with their wishes. But McCarthy made a devil’s bargain. He sold his soul to get the votes of just a few of the 20 Freedom Caucus members blocking his election. In doing so, he sold out the 200 reasonable conservatives who make up the remainder of the GOP House. 

How will the American public react to the GOP going after the FBI? That is exactly what Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan’s “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” a select investigative subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary that he heads, intends to do, per a Washington Post report. 

For example, among the things Jordan has said is that the Sub-Committee is “going to focus on” items such as- “(how) the Department of Justice treats parents as terrorists”, “the FBI pays Twitter… $3 million to censor American citizens,” “the former Democrat Chair of the Intelligence Committee pressured Twitter to censor a journalist,” and “if you’re a pro-life activist, you’re gonna get your door kicked in, you’re gonna get arrested and handcuffed.” 

Jordan’s charges are both misleading and ludicrous. The GOP was once the political party that supported law enforcement. Now, it’s the party going after the traditionally conservative FBI and DOJ. What a strange reversal. 

McCarthy could have avoided all of these asininities by simply cutting a deal with Democratic leadership. 

What kind of a deal? House Democrats would vote for McCarthy if he in turn refused to create Jim Jordan’s ridiculous politically motivated, vengeful, investigations sub-committee. Instead, McCarthy has single-handedly returned the 2024 House back to the Democrats, who will point to obvious House disfunction and complete failure to pass legislation under the GOP in 2023 and 2024.  

The Minority Leader, Hakeem Jefferies, must be laughing his head off at McCarthy’s antics. The only thing better for the Democrats would be if Trump is on the ballot, which he will be either as the GOP nominee or an independent “MAGA Party.”