'He will cost them': Conservative Peggy Noonan warns GOP is playing with fire by not dumping Santos
Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan this week warned Republicans that they would pay a price if they do not toss scandal-plagued Rep. George Santos overboard.
Noonan started off her latest column calling Santos' continued presence in Congress "an insult to the American people," and she described him as someone who "has for decades abused all around him by waging war on reality."
She then proceeded to recount the latest series of scandalous revelations about the recently elected New York Republican.
"In only the past week it has been reported that Mr. Santos operated over the years under several aliases and started a GoFundMe account for a homeless veteran’s ailing therapy dog, then absconded with the $3,000 it raised," she noted. "Mr. Santos’s mother, who he has stated was in her office in the south tower on 9/11, and whom he variously described as killed in the attack or barely escaping with her life, was in fact in Rio de Janeiro and hadn’t been in the U.S. since 1999."
After this, she turned her attention to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and other members of Republican leadership who have been dragging their feet doing something about Santos because they fear further diminishing their already-thin House majority.
Noonan then bypassed appealing to the Republicans' sense of shame and made the case that clinging onto Santos would cost them in less than two years.
"He will be used relentlessly by the Democrats, and the media, to make the Republican conference look like a cabal of fraudsters," she predicted. "In the short term he damages their reputation, in the long he will surely cost them seats. Have a majority of four, not five. Give one up, protect the rest. Get him off the floor and out of America’s sight."