Editors’ Blog

Over the course of the afternoon, four Republican Reps from New York state – all freshman – have called on George Santos to resign.

The first was Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who is from the adjoining 4th district. He made the announcement at the Nassau County GOP press conference we noted earlier. Since then Rep. Nick LaLota (1st), Rep. Nick Langworthy (23rd) and Rep. Brandon Williams (22nd) have all done the same. (I think this the rough order over the course of the day. But they’ve come in kind of a flurry.)

While announcing their committee’s call for freshman Rep. George Santos (R-NY) to resign from Congress today, Nassau County GOP Chairman Joseph Cairo, Jr. let a little bit of news slip.

“I remember specifically, I’m into sports a little bit, that he was a star on the Baruch volleyball team and that they won the league championship,” Cairo said, while walking reporters through a handful of other publicly known things that Santos had lied about on his resume.

“What can I tell ya,” he said. Peep his fellow party officials giggling in the background.

People forget that it wasn’t really the Freedom Caucus that knocked Kevin McCarthy out of contention for Speaker in 2015. They were part of it. But what did him in was that members from the rest of the caucus didn’t think he was ready. As the Speakership was hanging in the balance in 2015, he gave an interview in which he said that the whole point of the Benghazi hearings was to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That was true of course. But that wasn’t the public story for Republicans. Today’s comments from McCarthy are a reminder of that and a reminder that things probably haven’t changed.

There’s a simple way to avoid being forced to resign: Don’t resign. It’s really that simple. It always has been. Just don’t resign. George Santos seems to understand that. But I’ve never thought shaming or lack of support at home or on the Hill would drive him out. Lawsuits and prosecutions are what will bring him down. And likely sooner rather than later. Just which it will be I’m not sure. There are so many routes to criminal and civil liability.

We’re debuting a new feature of Morning Memo. Starting next week, we’ll deliver it FREE to your inbox every weekday morning. You can start signing up now:

We can all rest easy knowing accountability is in the unassailable hands of the newly minted Republican House leadership.

Scalise’s remarks come the same day that Democratic lawmakers actually did something tangible about the fact that there’s a freshman member of Congress who was just sworn in after admitting he lied about basically everything he’s ever said and done.

The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who until Sunday served as chief of security in the country’s capital Brasilia, according to the English-language Brazilian Report. Torres is a former justice minister under ex-President Bolsonaro. At the moment he is on “vacation” in the United States. Torres is at the center of suspicions that pro-Bolsonaro authorities were negligent or worse in security preparations for Sunday’s demonstrations.

The House GOP has passed its rules package and now the 118th Congress in the House is off to the races. But the rules package was never where McCarthy’s real concessions resided. The rules package wasn’t what signed control of the House over to the Freedom Caucus. That was contained in informal promises where McCarthy agreed to cede control over the committee that schedules votes, where he committed to backing the Freedom Caucus’s debt default plans and more.

I had assumed these were verbal agreements over hand shakes. But apparently not. According to the insider sheet Punchbowl News, in addition to the 55-page rules package hashed out between McCarthy’s supporters and the Freedom Caucus, there was an additional, secret three-page document spelling out the real agreement.

From Punchbowl …

The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor has an interesting rundown of differences and similarities between the events of Jan. 8 in Brazil and Jan. 6 two years ago. The fundamental difference, which any expert would have told you in advance, is the role of the Brazilian military and security services. Less than 40 years ago, Brazil was under military rule. Military rule is not some fantastical dystopia there. It’s the reality that most of the country’s political class grew up in.

Brazil’s insurrectionists had studied Jan. 6 closely. You can see that in so many of the visuals. But there was a key difference. The focus of the insurrectionists’ plan, in advance and on the day of, was to build support within the military. They camped out around military bases. They tried to build links to military factions. Nor was this some vain hope. It’s generally agreed that the military and security services were and are sympathetic to Bolsonaro. But political sympathy is not the same as a willingness to intervene to overthrow the political order. Tom Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, told Tharoor: “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support.” Institutional support, in this case, being the army and the police.