2022 U.S. Congressional (and Other) Elections

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Here's an amusing tweet from Santos himself from August 2021.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The question I have is, if Santos is seated and then McCarthy is elected speaker with exactly 218 votes, includes that of Santos, and then Santos gets forced out, what happens to McCarthy? Is there a mechanism to force a new vote? Well, it turns out that it used to be that any one member of the House could make a motion to replace the Speaker, but Pelosi required a majority of the majority party to sign off on the process. However, one of the demands that Freedom Caucus has made to support McCarthy is a return to the old method of allowing any one member to make such a motion. So, we will see.

[RoseMorninStar]

Santos' mother, Fatima Devolder, died in 2016.

Voronwë, I found Santo's claims of Biden just incredible. But that is what such people do, they project what they are doing onto others to justify their actions. If they lie, others lie which makes their lies OK. If they cheat, others are cheating which makes their cheating OK, etc.. etc.. If you want to know what they have done/are doing, pay attention to what they are accusing others of doing.

[N.E. Brigand]

I spent a little time reading through the Twitter accounts of various people whom the kickboxer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate had recently retweeted, hoping to get some more perspective on their populist views. One tweet seemed to summarize a lot of those opinions fairly concisely, and because it mentions elections -- and because results from Arizona, like today's announcement of the recount results for that state's attorney general election (the Democrat who had been leading by 510 votes in the original results, Kris Mayes, held on to win the race, but the recount margin was narrower: she won that statewide race by just 280 votes; that said, her opponent, Abe Hamadeh, has filed to delay her swearing in "until we resolve all matters regarding the potential discrepancies in the recount and litigation"), were particularly troubling to many of these folks -- I thought I'd post it here:



The low-hanging fruit is the supposed blanket mistrust of doctors: when he gets seriously ill, is he really going to eschew medical help?

One of the other items is coincidentally the subject of a New York Times article by Peter Baker today:



As someone else recently noted, every FBI director since that agency's founding in 1935 has been a Republican, whether appointed to the office by a Democratic or Republican president. The FBI has always skewed conservative. Donald Trump himself seems to have had friends among the rank-and-file at the FBI's New York office who helped him in 2016. The left has had good reasons to view the FBI skeptically. Does this guy now agree that they were right before? Or is he fine with the FBI spying on MLK and so forth?

I'm curious about when exactly these right-wing populists began distrusting "gov't reasons for war." Donald Trump halfheartedly supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but by 2008 he was complaining that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hadn't launched an impeachment inquiry into President Bush for having launched the war under false pretenses. Even so, conservatives generally seemed to favor the Iraq war for quite some years after that. What military actions changed their minds?

And that leads me back to elections: what would get these people to trust them again? Besides their preferred candidates winning all the time?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is clever. A waste of time, but clever.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The question I have is, if Santos is seated and then McCarthy is elected speaker with exactly 218 votes, includes that of Santos, and then Santos gets forced out, what happens to McCarthy? Is there a mechanism to force a new vote? Well, it turns out that it used to be that any one member of the House could make a motion to replace the Speaker, but Pelosi required a majority of the majority party to sign off on the process. However, one of the demands that Freedom Caucus has made to support McCarthy is a return to the old method of allowing any one member to make such a motion. So, we will see.

McCarthy offers his critics a key concession in effort to clinch House speakership

The question is, are we talking about any five members of the House (or any one, if Gaetz got his way) or only members of the GOP caucus?

[N.E. Brigand]

The New York Times notes some curiosities in George Santos's campaign expenditures. Here's how CNN's Kaitlan Collins sums it up:

"During his campaign, Santos spent $30,000 on hotels, $40,000 on airfare and $14,000 on car services. For comparison, Nick LaLota, another representative-elect from NY, spent roughly $900 on hotel stays, $3,000 on airfare and $900 on taxi services."

[Frelga]

Ritchie Torres, the representative from Bronx:

BIG NEWS: I am introducing a bill to require candidates to disclose under oath their employment, educational, & military history so we can punish candidates who lie to voters about their qualifications.

It will be called the Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker (SANTOS) ACT.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

You probably can't see it on tapatalk, but I posted Ritchie Torres' tweet announcing the SANTOS Act above.

[RoseMorninStar]

I think the SANTOS act is a very good idea. Which is probably why it won't pass.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There is no "probably" about it.

[RoseMorninStar]

[Frelga]

You probably can't see it on tapatalk, but I posted Ritchie Torres' tweet announcing the SANTOS Act above.

Oh, oops. Scrolled right past it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'll try not to rely so much on the tweet previews, but it is hard when so far as I can tell the relevant information is visible.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The question is, are we talking about any five members of the House (or any one, if Gaetz got his way) or only members of the GOP caucus?

I was able to see the actual proposed Rules. It is only members of the GOP caucus.

[Frelga]

Why is there always more?

Brazilian Authorities Will Revive Fraud Case Against George Santos

The matter, which stemmed from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook, had been suspended for the better part of a decade because the police were unable to locate him.

A spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office said that with Mr. Santos’s whereabouts identified, a formal request will be made to the U.S. Justice Department to notify him of the charges, a necessary step after which the case will proceed with or without him.

[N.E. Brigand]

Matt Schlapp.

[N.E. Brigand]

Matt Schlapp.

Matt Schlapp.

[N.E. Brigand]

Madison Cawthorn's campaign has yet to file its financial report with the Federal Election Commission for the second quarter of 2022; that filing was due a week ago. A new report in the Daily Beast suggests that the reason is that "Cawthorn’s campaign ended in a financial collapse, covering costs with donor money it wasn’t allowed to touch unless he won the primary . . . he owes donors hundreds of thousands, but he’s broke."

Congressman Madison Cawthorn personally lost more than $500,000 funding his failed reelection campaign and appears to have violated campaign finance law by using money in the primary that was specifically raised for the general election (in which he will not be on the ballot).

Madison Cawthorn, the freshman Republican Congressman from North Carolina who lost a primary race in his bid for reelection, seems to have largely abandoned his job with more than three months left to serve in his term in office: "It is difficult to discern what Cawthorn has been doing for his constituents ... a caller to two of his four district offices hears a recording that the offices are 'no longer regularly staffed' and that voice mail is not 'regularly' monitored." (source)

There's been new reporting yesterday and today about how it appears that the office of former Rep. Dan Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, "basically stopped casework when he lost the primary in May 2022." That would mean "eight months of his constituents not getting help with social security, Medicare, VA services, tax returns, passports, etc." So now his Republican successor's office is struggling to catch up with requests from all the people that Cawthorn abandoned.

It seems Cawthorn also moved to a new house he bought Florida six months before the end of his term.