Democrats Plan to Force Republicans to Vote on Serial Liar George Santos

Democrats are forcing Republicans’ hand on George Santos after introducing a resolution on Monday to censure the embattled freshman congressman.

The resolution, introduced by Representative Richie Torres, is privileged, meaning it has to be acted on. If Torres calls for a vote on the measure, then a vote must be held within 48 hours. This is the second time Democrats have introduced a privileged resolution on Santos over his many, many lies, moving in May to expel him from Congress. Republicans managed to refer that resolution to the House Ethics Committee.

“I have a message to House Republicans who, for too long, have been protecting Mr. Santos, who has disgraced the United States Congress,” Torres said when announcing the censure resolution on Twitter. “Stop treating Mr. Santos as untouchable. The time has come for Congress to hold him accountable.”

The resolution lists more than a dozen of Santos’s many lies, such as his fabricating the bulk of his professional and educational résumé—including that he received a volleyball scholarship for college. The resolution also calls out Santos’s lies that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, his mother died in the 9/11 attack, and four of his employees were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting. He also lied about founding an animal rescue charity and producing the disastrous Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Santos has been federally charged with 13 counts of various types of financial fraud, to which he has pleaded not guilty. He agreed to a deal with Brazilian authorities investigating him for financial fraud, and he is still under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Republicans, who have stood staunchly by Santos, were able to squash the previous resolution against him by arguing that the Ethics Committee probe hadn’t yet concluded. But the motion to censure has no effect on the Ethics Committee’s work, so it will be harder to argue down.

Santos could well be censured, as many of his fellow Republicans have called on him to resign over his falsehoods. This vote could actually prove important for Republican representatives, particularly from New York, who won in districts that went for President Joe Biden in 2020.

The majority of Santos’s constituents and New York voters in general want him out. New York Republicans who don’t vote against him could face a reckoning next November.

Robert Kennedy Jr. made a lot of people scratch their heads when he announced he was running for president as a Democrat. But even more bizarre is his list of donors, who are almost entirely Republican.

The bulk of Kennedy Jr.’s donors have previously given only to Republican candidates, according to the investigative newsletter Popular Information. Despite the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer running on the Democratic ticket, less than a quarter of his donors have a history of donating blue.

Kennedy Jr.’s campaign received the maximum donation of $6,600 from 96 individuals through the end of June. Among those donors, 37 previously have only given to Republican federal candidates, according to a Popular Information analysis of Kennedy Jr.’s Federal Election Commission filings. Thirty have no history of political donations, and only 19 of those donors are Democratic.

One donor is Mark Dickson, an aerospace businessman who has donated more than $450,000 to the GOP since 2015. A hefty $400,000 went to Donald Trump’s committee Trump Victory alone. Another donor is Keith Sheldon, a car dealership executive who donated to Trump in 2016 and 2020, as well as to Trump-endorsed candidate Herschel Walker in 2022.

Kennedy Jr. has also received donations from Purple Good Government, a PAC controlled by David Sacks. Sacks moderated the bizarre Twitter Space between Kennedy Jr. and Sacks’s good friend Elon Musk, and he has publicly backed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.

It’s actually no surprise that the right loves Kennedy Jr. He has openly embraced many of their talking points, such as that vaccines cause autism and that Covid-19 is the fault of Chinese people and Jewish people. He also initially agreed to speak at the far-right Moms for Liberty summit, although he ultimately backed out.

“We’re in a holy war. And I will tell you this: Because we’re willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war.”

This is what neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who had dinner with Republican front-runner Donald Trump less than one year ago, said at an “America First” rally in West Palm Beach on Sunday.

“They will go down—we have God on our side—and they will go down with their Satanic master,” he continued. “They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.”

Again, Fuentes had dinner with Trump in Florida last November. Neither Trump nor DeSantis—nor most of the Republican Party, for that matter—criticized Fuentes after learning what he stands for.

Fuentes’s comments on Sunday were livestreamed to some 5,000 people on Rumble. It’s unclear how many people were actually in the crowd, but in-person tickets for the rally went at $50 a pop, with $1,000 netting guests a special private dinner too. And the room of largely socially isolated boys with apparently nothing better to spend their money on roared in applause at Fuentes’s pledge to “make them die in the holy war.”

Elsewhere in the rally, Fuentes kicked out a heckler who questioned his previous support for far-right conspiracy theorist and January 6–inciter Ali Alexander, who allegedly propositioned teenage boys for sex and solicited nude photos and videos from them.

“Oh, security, get him out,” Fuentes said, with his finger pointed, unsurprisingly not engaging with the question. “Thank you, everybody,” Fuentes said to the crowd, appreciating the mob’s boos to drown out the uncomfortable inquiry.

Fellow far-right streamer Ethan Ralph—who was convicted of disseminating “revenge porn” of the mother of his child and ex-girlfriend, and separately is on bad terms with Fuentes—claimed that there were “36 cars total at Fuentes Rally 2 lmfao,” guessing there were about “144 ppl.”

Meanwhile, the rally seems to have, perhaps, given others some concern too. “!!” Elon Musk replied to a tweet with screenshots of the event’s comment section on Rumble.

The comments included remarks such as, “HITLER FAILED US BY NOT FINISHING THE JOB,” “WITHOUT LIES ISLAM DIES,” and “Jew rapists,” as well as eager use of a vicious slur against Jewish people.

But given the content, one may wish Musk’s consequent amplification of the tweet would’ve included more explicit concern than just an exclamation.

Fuentes’s comments, of course, are not aberrant. Fuentes was previously banned from social media outlets for violent rhetoric about people of color, women, Jewish people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Covid-19, and much more. He has also proudly said he’s “just like Hitler” (whom he has also called “a pedophile … also really fucking cool”), and that “Catholic monarchy, and just war, and crusades, and inquisitions” are much better than democracy.

Such a character is set to be headlining a College Republicans convention at the end of July.

Donald Trump is planning to completely overhaul how the government works if he wins the 2024 presidential election, which would clear the way for him to do pretty much whatever he wants.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, told The New York Times.

One of the central parts of Trump’s fascist plan to consolidate power is to bring independent agencies under presidential control, including the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law and consumer protection rules.

But that’s not all: Trump also wants to be able to impound funds, meaning refuse to spend money appropriated for programs he doesn’t like. The tactic was banned under Richard Nixon, but Trump insists on his campaign website that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds. He says he will reinstate the practice, even though it could spark a lengthy legal battle.

He also plans to eliminate employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants, making them easier to replace. He would then purge intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the defense agencies of officials whom he has deemed members of “the sick political class that hates our country.”

Trump has already said he would launch a criminal investigation into President Joe Biden if he takes back the White House. But his new plans would go a step further and centralize power under the executive branch.

It’s unclear just how much of this Trump would get away with. Congress could pass laws to block him, and many of his plans would certainly get locked up in the court system. But the point is less whether he can succeed and more that Trump is willing to do absolutely anything to get and stay in power.

He has already shown a willingness to act with impunity. Trump repeatedly claimed that presidents can declassify materials whenever they want, “even by thinking about it.” And now, even after he’s been federally indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents, he still insists he’s done nothing wrong.

Turns out that billionaire Harlan Crow’s relentless gift-showering (read: warm, beautiful friendship) toward Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t enough on its own—it was also part of a tax break bonanza for the Republican megadonor.

Once again, ProPublica has revealed even more troubling details about the billionaire’s shady dealings with one of the most powerful members of the U.S. government. It seems that Crow has, for years, likely pretended that his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose, was a chartering business in order to avoid paying taxes—and Thomas’s voyages on the ship helped maintain the facade.

Decades ago, Crow and his family had formed a company, Rochelle Charter Inc., in order to lease out their superyacht, ProPublica details. And from data between 2003 to 2015, the company reported losing money in 10 of the 13 years; the net losses reached nearly $8 million, with about half flowing to Harlan himself. The deductions helped the family offset income elsewhere, saving the Crows from paying taxes. The pattern echoes what billionaires often do with their private jets (which, of course, was another vehicle used by Crow to taxi Thomas and the justice’s family around the world).

The yacht tax breaks, among other loopholes, enabled Crow to pay an average income tax rate of 15 percent during the time period, lower than that of many middle-class workers in America.

The kicker is that while these sorts of deductions can only be had by a purported business operator, it doesn’t seem like the Michaela Rose was a legitimate business pursuit. ProPublica spoke to about a dozen former crew members of the ship, and none of them said they were aware of the superyacht ever being chartered. Cross-checking that with schedules for three different years, the boat seemingly was only ever used to cruise Crow’s family, friends, and executives of his company around.

And that’s not all. As recently as 2019, an attorney representing the supposed yacht chartering company, Rochelle Carter, filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Success with such an application requires basic things like, you know, showing that the Michaela Rose was actually being used commercially.

The attorney attached a brochure as proof. “This magnificent yacht has cruised the oceans of the world with a graceful and gentle motion found only on the most superior seagoing vessels,” the pamphlet said, boasting of the boat’s “fine, seakindly hull” and “mahogany paneled formal dining room” that seats 16. But, ProPublica notes, it said nothing about chartering.

The USPTO was, naturally, not satisfied, up until the attorney provided new supposed evidence—screenshots from websites like Superyachts.com and LiveYachting.com, showing “links and references to yacht ‘Charter’ services offered in connection with Applicant’s MICHAELA ROSE mark,” according to the attorney. The USPTO caved and approved the trademark. As ProPublica points out, neither website actually guarantees that the ship was a business. The former hosts profiles for hundreds of ships—regardless of whether they can be chartered. The latter just encouraged users to contact a broker to find out if a boat could be chartered.

“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden told ProPublica. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”

Such a scandal adds to the Mount Everest of malfeasance festering within Crow and Thomas. Thomas has received secret and lavish gifts for decades from the Nazi memorabilia–collecting billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow, including luxurious island-hopping excursions on superyachts, tuition payments for his grandnephew’s private schooling, and even a secret deal in which Crow bought Thomas family property and proceeded to upgrade it while Thomas’s mother still lived in it. Separately, meanwhile, Thomas’s aide collected Venmo payments, allegedly for a “Christmas Party” hosted by the justice, from a string of high-rolling lawyers with cases before the Supreme Court.