Kevin McCarthy on George Santos: Well, Is There a Charge Against Him?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed Wednesday to overlook the fact that serial fabulist George Santos has already been charged with fraud, saying he would not ask the New York congressman to resign.

McCarthy—whose Republican Party holds the House majority by only a few seats and who needs every vote he can get—sought to defend Santos, even as the latter’s list of tall tales seems to grow longer by the hour.

“What are the charges against him?” McCarthy asked reporters, in what he clearly thought was a bump-set-spike of a response. “In America today, you’re innocent till proven guilty. So just because somebody doesn’t like the press you have, it’s not me that can oversay what the voters say.”

But as fate would have it, Santos has been charged—in Brazil, where he is accused of fraud for stealing a checkbook in 2008 and using it to make purchases. He is also at the center of three other criminal probes.

Federal prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York are looking into Santos’s finances and financial disclosures. The Nassau County district attorney is investigating Santos over the falsehoods in his résumé, although the office has not said what specifically it will be looking at. New York Attorney General Letitia James has said her office will investigate Santos and his multiple apparent fabrications.

The freshman congressman was also hit with two ethics complaints this week, one to the House Ethics Committee over his financial disclosures and one to the Federal Election Commission for alleged misrepresentation and misuse of campaign funds.

Santos has already received multiple calls to resign from Democrats, and on Wednesday alone, three House Republicans also urged him to step down. Leaders of the Republican Party in Nassau County, which Santos represents, called for him to resign, as well.

House Republican leadership, though, seems almost loath to even chastise Santos. Both McCarthy and Majority Leader Steve Scalise have evaded questions about Santos, and the New York Republican will still receive committee assignments (but don’t worry, they’ll be lower-tier ones).

Representative Barbara Lee says she’ll run for Senate in California in 2024, setting up a sure to be crowded Democratic primary.

During a closed-door Congressional Black Caucus meeting Wednesday, Representative Barbara Lee told her colleagues that she will be running for Senate, Politico reported Wednesday. Though no official announcement has been made, the decision comes one day after her progressive colleague Representative Katie Porter announced her own run for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat.

Lee, a member of Congress since 1998, has led a storied career in and around politics. As a college student, she helped bring Representative Shirley Chisholm to visit her campus; Lee went on to work for the congresswoman’s historic run for president in 1972 as the first Black candidate seeking a major party’s nomination. Lee also volunteered for the Black Panther Party’s community learning center and worked for Party co-founder Bobby Seale’s Oakland mayoral campaign.

Thereafter, Lee worked as a staff member for Representative Ron Dellums, before serving in the state Assembly and Senate. Finally, in 1998, Lee was elected to California’s 9th district.

Lee has garnered generally progressive bona fides throughout her time in Congress. She is a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and chair emeritus and former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and was a founding member of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.

Lee’s most notable moment came as she was the lone member of Congress to vote against authorizing the use of force following the September 11 attacks. She warned fellow members to be “careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”

“It was a blank check,” Lee wrote on September 23, 2001. “In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.” Lee’s foresight proved prophetic. “We must respond, but the character of that response will determine for us and for our children the world that they will inherit.”

With two candidates expressing interest in the Senate seat, Feinstein has remained mum about her intentions. The 89-year-old senator has led a long career, having served in the Senate for 30 years. But in the past year, lawmakers and staffers alike have expressed concerns about Feinstein’s mental capacities and whether she can continue serving.

If Lee does indeed run, she will be joining a quickly filling competitive field alongside Porter. Representatives Ro Khanna and Adam Schiff are also rumored to be heavily interested in joining the field. Khanna has said he would take Lee’s intentions into account while considering his own decision; members of Schiff’s inner circle chided Porter for announcing while California faces a weather disaster (in a way only those in a primary opponent’s orbit might).

But based on Lee’s likely step in, the race is on—whether Schiff likes it or not.

New York Republicans are calling on George Santos to resign, saying he “disgraced” the House of Representatives with his serial lies.

Republican leaders of Nassau County, which Santos represents, said Wednesday there was “absolutely no way Mr. Santos can be an effective member of Congress” and urged him to step down immediately.

They also slammed him for being “insincere, glib, and insulting” when answering questions about his background, much of which he appears to have fabricated.

Santos stayed true to form in responding, tweeting, “I will NOT resign!”

Several Democrats have already said Santos should resign, but this latest call is the first from any form of Republican leadership. Representative Anthony D’Esposito became the first House Republican to call for Santos’s resignation, as he joined the press conference Wednesday.

The call for Santos’s resignation comes a day after he was hit with his second ethics complaint just this week. New York Democrats Ritchie Torres and Daniel Goldman filed a formal complaint Tuesday asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Santos broke the Ethics in Government Act. On Monday, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center also filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Santos of masking the real source of his campaign’s funds, misrepresenting his campaign’s spending, and using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors and prosecutors in Nassau County are investigating Santos’s finances and financial disclosures.

Santos has admitted he fabricated parts of his professional background. It appears he also made up details of his educational history, his ethnicity and religion, and even his mother’s death. His list of his tall tales appears to grow longer by the day.

House Republican leadership, however, still seems unsure of what exactly to do with him. With the party holding onto the House majority by only a few seats, every vote counts—and Santos proved his loyalty by voting for Kevin McCarthy in every round of votes for speaker. It appears that Santos will still get committee assignments, so any consequences for him remain unclear.

This post has been updated.

The Internal Revenue Service is finally semi-functional, which House Republicans apparently see as a good time to gut the agency entirely, even though doing so would cost the United States billions of dollars.

An independent watchdog agency reported Wednesday that the IRS began 2023 on a high note, having reduced its backlog of unprocessed tax returns by two-thirds over the past year. “We have begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Erin Collins, the IRS’s national taxpayer advocate, wrote in the report. “I am just not sure how much further we have to travel before we see sunlight.”

But House Republicans, who control the chamber, voted Monday to rescind nearly $80 billion recently allotted to the IRS and will soon vote on the Fair Tax Act, which would eliminate the agency entirely. While neither measure will pass the Democratic-controlled Senate or White House, both are indicative of Republican plans to undermine any gains Democrats have made in the past two years.

The IRS recently received a massive $80 billion infusion from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which Phillip Swagel, head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, predicted would produce more than $180 billion in revenue over the next decade. The money would help hire and train more agents, as well as modernize the IRS’s internal systems.

Republicans have argued that improving the IRS would lead to more audits for middle-class people, spreading a fearmongering, bananas theory that the new agents would actually be part of a highly weaponized “shadow army.”

In reality, as The Washington Post noted, Democrats point out that “audits are meant to collect money from very rich people who are avoiding taxes.”

The IRS is no one’s favorite agency. It is chronically understaffed and underfunded, and burdened with a seemingly Sisyphean task. Even though it has dramatically reduced its backlog, it still has 10 million unprocessed tax returns from previous years to get through. It has also come under intense scrutiny recently for apparently failing to audit former President Donald Trump’s taxes until two years into his term, in violation of standard operating policy.

But Republicans have a long-standing vendetta against the tax agency, and they certainly oppose the Biden administration, even at the cost of progress and their own purported ideals. Despite constantly talking about fiscal responsibility and needing to reduce the federal deficit, the House GOP still voted to rescind the IRS funding, even though doing so would actually increase the deficit by more than $114 billion.

Democrats have flipped a crucial state Senate seat in Virginia, ensuring greater protection of abortion rights in the state.

Democrat Aaron Rouse defeated Republican Kevin Adams in the special election race for Virginia’s 7th Senate district, flipping the seat formerly held by Republican Jen Kiggans. The win extends the Democrats’ advantage in the Senate to 22–18, almost certainly halting some of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s most radical agenda items, including a proposed 15-week abortion ban.

The Virginia Public Access Project has declared Rouse the winner, with the Democrat leading Adams by fewer than 400 votes as of Wednesday morning (and absentee ballots still being counted). Adams conceded on Wednesday morning.

The election was prompted by Kiggans’s rise to the U.S. House of Representatives, after she defeated Elaine Luria for Virginia’s 2nd district seat in November. Rouse promised to safeguard abortion rights, while his Republican opponent supported a 15-week abortion ban.

Rouse’s win is yet another domino falling on the red-wave-that-never-was for Republicans—one that in no small part was hamstrung by voters motivated by abortion rights. Rouse, a former Virginia Beach councilman and NFL player, had campaigned significantly on the issue.

“One, two, three. One, we are going to protect a woman’s right to choose health care, we are going to build an economy that works for everyone, and we are going to support our public education system, making sure our teachers and staff have a salary they can be proud of,” Rouse said on Tuesday.

The election results will still need to be officially certified, which may take weeks. But if the results hold, the right to abortion in Virginia will have a more resilient safeguard against attacks from Republicans like Youngkin.

Illinois is now the ninth state in the United States to ban assault weapons. Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill late Tuesday night banning the sale and possession of assault weapons.

The state Senate passed the “Protect Illinois Communities Act” 34–20 on Monday, kicking it to the state House, which approved the bill 68–41 Tuesday. Pritzker signed the bill shortly thereafter, immediately enacting it into law. The bill passed just before newly elected officials were to be sworn in on Wednesday.

Illinois will halt the sale and possession of an array of assault weapons, handguns, and high-capacity magazines and “switches”—rapid-fire devices that can convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic machine guns.

The ban comes six months after a mass shooter killed seven people at a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb. The gunman had used a legally purchased semiautomatic weapon.

“After nearly every mass shooting, we’ve seen efforts to ban dangerous weapons thwarted—and then leaders send their thoughts and prayers, while they throw their hands up, resigning themselves to the idea that gun violence is a sacrifice that Americans must accept,” Pritzker said at a press conference. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Now nine states, as well as Washington, D.C., forbid the sale or possession of such weapons. The Illinois State Rifle Association has already threatened to challenge the ban in court. Meanwhile, a recent poll showed 63 percent of Illinoisans in favor of banning assault weapons.

“This assault weapons ban is a step in the right direction,” Pritzker said at a press conference. “But there’s no magic fix, no single law that will end gun violence once and for all. So we must keep fighting, voting, and protesting to ensure that future generations will only have to read about massacres like Highland Park, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde in their history books. It’s our burden and our mandate, one that we carry with solemn honor for our children who will grow up in a better and safer world.”

Flights have begun to resume Wednesday after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded planes nationwide earlier in the day due to a crucial information system outage, causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations.

The FAA issued the ground stop after the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system, which provides pilots and flight personnel with real-time information about hazards and restrictions such as equipment failures or closed runways, stopped working.

More than 5,400 flights have been delayed throughout the United States and more than 900 canceled after the outage, according to the flight tracker site FlightAware. The FAA says it does not yet know the source of the outage, but White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said there is “no evidence of a cyberattack at this point.”

President Joe Biden has been briefed on the issue and ordered the Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the matter, she said.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted that he was in touch with the FAA and would be investigating the outage’s “root causes.”

The outage will put more scrutiny on Buttigieg, who is already facing criticism over the Southwest Airlines debacle during the winter holiday travel season.

Buttigieg made a splash during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and many speculated that his appointment to the DOT was setting him up as a potential Biden successor.

The airline crises are the latest tests of how Buttigieg performs under pressure, and so far, some find that he is coming up short: More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers sent him a letter last week, urging him to do “much more” to hold airlines accountable for cancellations and protect passengers’ rights.

House Republicans have recommended twice as many men named Michael to chair committees as women in general.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise released a list of recommendations that was ratified on Tuesday. Six men named Mike or Michael will be chairing committees, while only three women will be doing the same.

The only women appointed were Kay Granger to the Appropriations Committee; Cathy McMorris Rodgers to the Energy and Commerce Committee; and Virginia Foxx to what was formerly the Committee on Education and Labor, now the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Mike Rogers chairs the Armed Services Committee, Michael McCaul leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Mike Bost heads the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Mike Turner chairs the Intelligence Committee, Michael Guest leads the Ethics Committee, and Mike Gallagher will helm the new House Select Committee on China.

An honorable mention goes to Mark Green, the new head of the Committee on Homeland Security, for having 50 percent of the same letters in his name as the Mikes. The imbalance is especially stark during an administration that has prided itself on the diversity of its appointees.

All nine of the Mikes, Mark, and women were loyal supporters of Kevin McCarthy during his seemingly unending bid for speaker of the House. Rogers went so far as to threaten to ban anyone who voted against McCarthy from sitting on a committee—and apparently got into a fight with Matt Gaetz on the House floor.

A relentless onslaught of winter storms have pummeled California, leaving 16 people dead—more than the number of people who have died from California wildfires in the past two years. Now, as more rain looms, some 34 million Californians are under flood watches, or about 90 percent of the state’s total population and 10 percent of the country’s.

“These floods are deadly and have now turned to be more deadly than even the wildfires here in the state of California,” said Governor Gavin Newsom during a press conference Sunday, where he requested a state of emergency from the White House.

The weeks-long storming has left thousands of people without power as dangerous mudslides and flooding have plagued much of the state.

On Monday alone, between five and 10 inches of rain fell across areas facing flood warnings—with some rain levels peaking as high as 15.5 inches. The National Weather Service says that even six inches of water can reach the bottom of most passenger cars, while 12 would float many vehicles.

Hundreds of thousands have had their power knocked out over the course of the ongoing storms. As of writing, Poweroutage.us tracks just under 180,000 customers currently without power.

In a vacuum, such amounts of rain may superficially sound like a welcome interruption in a region blighted by drought. After all, the massive rainfall is part of what are known as “atmospheric rivers,” systems operating as rivers in the sky, which provide the region with much-needed water. But outside of the vacuum, this series is dropping too much precipitation too quickly. This is largely due to the ever-worsening impacts of climate change.

Warmer and drier conditions have led to more punishing drought in the region; such conditions have helped spark even more damaging wildfires and left the land less able to soak up precipitation. The conditions also lead to less staying annual snowpack, precipitation coming instead in the form of rainwater. All that combines in a recipe for disaster, as is on display now.

Terrifyingly, an August study warned the risk of once-in-a-lifetime megafloods is increasing and will become more damaging, particularly if human-caused climate change patterns continue. The study suggests that storms like the one in California will happen more often, and the “ceiling” for megafloods will increase in both likelihood and potential damage.

So California demands our attention on multiple fronts: the people who need help now and the dire need to improve our systems of life so these crises don’t get even worse.

Serial fabulist George Santos maintained Tuesday that he has done “nothing unethical,” even after being hit with two ethics complaints in as many days.

On Tuesday, two of his fellow New York representatives filed an ethics complaint against him. Ritchie Torres and Daniel Goldman, both Democrats, filed a formal complaint asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Santos broke the Ethics in Government Act by failing to file “timely, accurate, and complete financial disclosure reports.” They then personally hand-delivered the complaint to Santos.

The two say that his reports for 2020 and 2022 lack sufficient information and that Santos has contradicted what is in the 2022 reports in his public statements.

“They’re free to do whatever they want,” Santos told reporters in response. “I have done nothing unethical.”

Santos, who was sworn in Saturday, has admitted he fabricated parts of his professional background. But it appears he also made up details of his educational history, his ethnicity and religion, and even his mother’s death.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center also filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, accusing Santos of masking the real source of campaign’s funds, misrepresenting his campaign’s spending, and using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors and prosecutors in Nassau County, New York, are investigating Santos’s finances and financial disclosures.

Santos has faced multiple calls to resign from Democrats, but Republican leadership seems unsure of what exactly to do with him. With the party holding onto the House majority by only a few seats, every vote counts—and Santos proved his loyalty by voting for Kevin McCarthy in every round of votes for speaker.

As Politico put it, “House Republicans know George Santos is a problem. They’re just not sure what to do about him yet.” One option includes not seating him on any committees, but the final consequences of his fabrications are still unclear.