Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Ready to Give George Santos a Chance

Embattled Representative-elect George Santos has been taking fire on numerous fronts as the steady drip of lies and fabrications continues to churn in the newscycle. But he has at least found one ally willing to look past all of his problems: Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Santos has admitted to lying about his professional background and education. He maintains he merely claimed to be “Jew-ish” despite previously claiming he was descended from Holocaust refugees. He has yet to explain how he went from reporting having no assets or earned income in 2020 to declaring he was worth millions in 2022. It apparently took 15 years for his mother to die in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

He now faces calls to resign and an investigation by the Nassau County district attorney. Fellow Republican New York Representative-elect Nick LaLota has called for Santos to be investigated by the House Ethics Committee. But the most prominent House Republicans have remained silent…until now.

Greene, one of the most vocal MAGA Republicans in Congress, came out swinging in Santos’s defense Tuesday night.

“I think we Republicans should give George Santos a chance and see how he legislates and votes, not treat him the same as the left is,” she said on Twitter, noting she believes “actions and words are extremely important.” Therein, of course, lies the rub: Greene is a conspiracy theorist who has lied to her constituents about the outcome of the 2020 election, Covid, and climate change. She has voted against major legislation that would improve the lives of the people she represents.

And all of her latest words and actions are likely nothing more than a power play. Greene has been an avid supporter of Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speakership. With Republicans holding only a razor-thin majority in the chamber, McCarthy will need every vote he can get to take the gavel—and that includes Santos.

Santos won his district by only eight points. If he is recalled, there is no guarantee the district—which went for Joe Biden in 2020—will send another Republican to Congress.

Greene has tried to rally her colleagues behind McCarthy. If she succeeds, then the new speaker will owe her—and perhaps Santos—big time.

The past few years have been rough on all of us. Many have lost jobs, homes, loved ones. In these uneasy times, we have been able to look up to the select few who have persisted anyhow—but even our heroes need a break too.

Such is the tale of authoritarian former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, whose loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in this year’s presidential election may lead him to seek refuge at … Donald Trump’s Florida resort? It’s a very on-trend move, anyway.

According to Brazilian outlet UOL, Bolsonaro plans to skip out on officially handing over the presidential sash to Lula, and instead cool his jets at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The venue is familiar territory for Bolsonaro; he and Trump shared a meal there in March 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic which both leaders famously bungled (the U.S leads the world in Covid deaths at nearly 1.2 million; Brazil is right behind at nearly 700,000).

A future Zagat guide might describe the resort as the perfect sanctuary for serially-criminal and basically off-putting guys who just cannot fathom that people simply might not want to vote for them again. However, some Bolsonaro insiders claim that his New Year’s Eve destination will actually be an Orlando condominium—a home offered to Bolsonaro by a supporter.

La Nacion’s reporting affirms the ambiguity of Bolsonaro’s exact plans, but confirms preparations are indeed in motion for the former President to travel to Florida. He will likely depart in the coming days, as access to the presidential plane only lasts through his term, which expires Saturday. So, while Bolsonaro will ring in the new year retreating from his home country, the revival of Lula will mark the new year in Brazil.

It remains unclear whether Bolsonaro will be joined on holiday by his wife, Michelle. Earlier reports indicated she would not be traveling, but recent updates report her planning to travel to Miami while her husband embarks on his solo venture.

Regardless, Bolsonaro—who has still refused to concede the election—now may be skipping his successor’s inauguration and ditching his wife to sojourn in Florida for up to two months. Perhaps we just found our Loser of the Year.

Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are on the rise once more in the United States, but government funding to fight the disease is on the decline—permanently.

Existing funds to battle the coronavirus are running out, and the White House has been asking Congress for months to include billions of dollars for testing, vaccines, and treatments in the omnibus spending package that just passed the Senate. But the massive $1.7-trillion federal budget bill includes no mention of federal Covid funding.

In June, Joe Biden’s administration began using funds previously earmarked for coronavirus tests and protective equipment to buy more antiviral pills and vaccines. Eventually, that money will run out, too. Once government funding ends, paying for Covid testing, vaccines, and treatments will be bounced back to health insurance companies, which will make it “incredibly hard to deal with COVID, to get tested for it, to get treated,” Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care doctor in Washington, told Marketplace.

For a few years, the coronavirus forced the U.S. government and health care system to actually work. Testing centers dotted street corners; treatments were free; and vaccines were smoothly rolled out on a massive scale. But when government funding dries up, that is all going to change for the worse.

More than 27 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2021, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, meaning they and anyone else who has since lost coverage would have to pay out of pocket for Covid supplies. And many of them will likely be unable to afford to do so. As a result, more people are likely to forgo getting the latest booster shot or even getting tested, raising the probability of increased community spread and the likelihood of new variants emerging.

Biden has declared the pandemic over (except for people who have chronic illnesses or autoimmune issues, or are disabled). But if people are forced to do without the latest vaccine, it may very well come surging back.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House January 6 investigative committee that she saw her erstwhile boss, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, regularly burn documents in his office fireplace.

Hutchinson was a star witness for the committee over the summer, providing bombshell details about Donald Trump’s level of knowledge of and involvement in the attack on the Capitol. She also made a series of fiery revelations when she initially testified in May, according to transcripts the committee released Tuesday.

Hutchinson said that Meadows burned multiple batches of documents about a dozen times in his office fireplace between December 2020 and January 2021, including after two meetings with Representative Scott Perry. Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, has been linked to efforts to make the Justice Department overturn the 2020 election.

Meadows has been ordered to testify about efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. Talking Points Memo also reported in early December that a laundry list of election deniers in Congress had texted Meadows multiple times about subverting U.S. democracy in Trump’s favor.

Hutchinson also testified that Representative Marjorie Taylor Green discussed the QAnon conspiracy group multiple times with Meadows and Trump; during one of those conversations, she told Meadows that her QAnon supporters would be attending the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, which eventually turned into the Capitol Riot.

Her testimony comes a week after the revelation that Trump’s former ethics attorney advised Hutchinson to lie to the January 6 committee.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted to keep Title 42—a Trump-era policy that expels asylum seekers—in effect, overriding a district judge’s November decision that would have ended the policy last week. The Supreme Court will now entertain arguments in February, with a decision expected months from now, in June.

The 5-4 decision went in favor of the 19 Republican state attorneys general who had filed an emergency request in response to a ruling from U.S. district judge Emmet Sullivan, who ruled that Title 42 was “arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.” Sullivan’s ruling described how the Center for Disease Control hadn’t evolved the policy alongside the changing state of the pandemic, failing to make adjustments as wider availability of vaccines, testing, and treatments became the norm.

The majority’s decision flicked at the court’s conservative bloc’s tendency to play Calvinball with the law; having previously allowed the Trump administration the leeway to act as it willed in illegally rejecting asylum seekers, it thwarted the attempts of the executive branch to remediate those policies once it became “the Biden administration.”

But the decision didn’t entirely break along partisan lines. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Kentanji Brown Jackson in dissenting. Gorsuch wrote that “the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” and accordingly, “courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency.”

Gorsuch’s thoughts in a losing opinion can only provide so much comfort. After all, just as the 19 Republican attorneys general sought to use Covid as a justification for draconian asylum restrictions, the Supreme Court played a similar round of Covid Calvinball last year when deciding to reject administrative action for workplace safety. Arguing that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Covid testing mandate for workers overstepped the boundaries of the agency’s authority by issuing a “public health” edict instead of a “workplace safety” rule, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to block the mandate.

In that instance, the court’s six conservative justices argued that Covid presented a “universal risk” and not just a specifically occupational hazard; the dissenters rightly pointed out that “[the OSHA statute] is indifferent to whether a hazard in the workplace is also found elsewhere.… That provision authorizes regulation to protect employees from all hazards present in the workplace.… It does not matter whether those hazards also exist beyond the workplace walls.”

With the conservative-led Supreme Court’s incoherence on overseeing Covid-inspired policy, it’s no surprise that Republican members of congress—particularly those who have been on the front lines of Covid denialism—have cited the pandemic as a justification to skip votes (and sometimes end up instead happily attending CPAC).

The United States continues to disregard its own laws and principles on accepting asylum seekers. Halfway through the Biden administration, the Trump-era policy tweak has been allowed to continue while Biden has sought to quietly neutralize the border as an issue. In response to the Court’s decision, the administration says it is still preparing to manage the border while the Court reviews Title 42, and challenges Republicans “to move past political finger-pointing and join their Democratic colleagues in solving the challenge at our border.” But such bland messaging might not be up to snuff in confronting a Supreme Court that seems to want to make up the rules of the game as it goes along.