POLITICS IN THE AGE OF GEORGE SANTOS

JOHN ZIPPERER: Welcome to Week to Week. This, by the way, completes our 11th year as The Commonwealth Club’s political roundtable.

I’m your host for Week to Week. I’m also a former Goldman Sachs and Citigroup employee, a graduate of Baruch College and the former head of Friends of Pets United. [Laughter.]

So our first topic: There’s been a lot of power changing hands in Washington, D.C., over the past couple of months. Let’s focus on the U.S. House of Representatives, which was won by the Republicans in the fall election. The GOP holds the chamber with a slim margin of four votes, and that narrow majority came into play in glorious Technicolor during the recent selection of the speaker of the House, which, of course was finally won by California Representative Kevin McCarthy.

Melissa, I want to start with you. Much was made about the Wagnerian opera of the selection process that we all witnessed. But what about the substance? What was happening?

Excerpted from the January 19, 2023, program “Week to Week Political Roundtable: 2023 Kickoff.”

TIM ANAYA , Communications Director, Pacific Research Institute; Former Assembly GOP and California Legislature Staffer

BOB BUTLER , Reporter, KCBS Radio; Broadcast Vice

President, SAGAFTRA; Mentor, SPJNews 2022

MELISSA CAEN, Host, “Get Out the Bet” Podcast; Political Analyst and Journalist; Attorney

JOHN ZIPPERER , Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club of California—Host

What was the meaning of these very tense battles we were seeing within the Republican Party?

MELISSA CAEN: Oh, boy. [As Elmer Fudd]“Kill da wabbit.” [Laughter.]

So here’s the thing. The things that the holdout Republicans were fighting about are actually, if you look at the list of things that they wanted, some of them folks on the left would object to; some of them you can debate; but there were certain things that they were trying to do to kind of unclench the party fist in the House.

You have even people like AOC coming out saying, “You know what, these aren’t all terrible. Like, this is actually a good thing that we’re going to be able to vote on more things, we’re going to be able to debate more things,” because the way it kind of works now is whoever’s in power goes into a room and comes up with a bill and it’s like 75,000 pages long and it’s got everything in the world in it. And then they just immediately bring it out to the floor, vote on it, and that’s it. So there are a couple of the things that they were trying to do that I think we can all hold hands and agree are probably okay. It would probably be okay to vote on things more and to debate more and to have bills that aren’t huge books that only get put on the floor and you vote right away. There’s a 72-hour rule as part of the thing. So that’s part of it.

There’s also, you know, they want to go after Hunter Biden. And there are the other kind of more partisan things in there. But there are certain parts of this that it’s hard to make the case against, really. If you are, like me, not a fan of political parties, I was like, “Okay, great.”

[We might] not like the drama of it. But I wasn’t mad at some of the things that they were asking for, even though I’m not a Republican.

TIM ANAYA: I think one of the interesting things is we’re used to the speaker being this kind of all-powerful person in Washington, and historically, the speaker was very powerful. They controlled all the money that was doled out to candidates, and they certainly controlled all the committee assignments and perks and what kind of office you got and what kind of congressional delegation trips that you got to go on.

I think this whole debate shows us that that’s really a relic of the past. Now that internet grassroots fundraising is such a big thing right now, someone like a Matt Gaetz or an AOC [is] not dependent on the party leadership anymore. So when they come to them and say “You better vote for this or else,” or “You better vote for me or else,” they can tell them to pound sand, because they’ve got their own $20 million in the bank and they have a whole network of people across the country who are following what they’re doing and are sending in their $5 and $10.

I think that kind of drama was on full display for us to see really for the first time of how different things are in Washington today.

CAEN: Literally, [in one confrontation, we could see] the congressmen get [in another congressman’s] face. The security guy came and kind of grabbed him by the face. That was an amazing C-SPAN [moment]. I remember watching it and being like, “What is happening right now?” People are walking up the aisle and yelling at each other. My British friends were like, “Thanks, America. We were a little sheepish after our whole prime minister thing there for a minute. But you have successfully taken the attention away from us and put it on your system.” [Laughter.]

BOB BUTLER: Yeah. C-SPAN. That may be one of the next bills—to ban C-SPAN from being in the House.

ZIPPERER: They really showed their value. What were your thoughts when you were watching this unfold?

BUTLER: I was sitting here thinking the country is in a position where you want legislators who are going to legislate for the people. And I just don’t feel comfortable that the Republican Party really cares about legislating for the people. Who in their right mind would propose getting rid of Social Security or changing it to the point where anybody who’s getting it would lose out? That, to me, is a loser for their constituents. I can’t wait for the debate on getting rid of the IRS in favor of a 30 percent sales tax.

CAEN: Well, here’s the thing, though. When you’ve got a split between the House and the Senate like we do now, where you have the House controlled by one party, and the Senate controlled by the other, you get a lot of signaling legislation. The Democrats do this, too; when Republicans are in charge of the Senate, you constantly will get emails [from House Democrats] saying, “We passed our bill giving a free puppy to every American and it died in the Senate.” You never thought that was going to actually take place.

BUTLER: With voting rights—

CAEN: [The whole point of passing signaling legislation is] to be able to send that email asking me for money, telling me you did the thing. So now that it’s flipped and now that the Democrats are in charge in the Senate and Republicans in the House, there’s going to be a lot of that. There’s going to be a lot of bills that are passed in the House that you might think are totally bananas, but it’s just so they can go back and tell their constituents, “I voted for that bill” even though they know it would nev- er actually happen.

We’ll probably see a lot of that. There’s a lot of people making representations, but it’s really a lot of just fundraising and no one really thinks necessarily they’re going to be signed into law.

ANAYA: I can speak to that, having worked in the California legislature for nearly 20 years. There are bills that you have in your package every year that are district bills to solve problems that your constituents have come forward with. And then there are bills—we would call them “messaging bills”—where there’s an issue like tax reform or Social Security reform, where you’re not going to pass it. You may not even bring it up for a vote in some cases, but you want to start a conversation sometimes. A lot of legislation doesn’t pass in the first year or even in the first session. Sometimes it takes five or ten years to get the ball moving and build a coalition around that issue. So some of these ideas—there’s no way any of those bills are ever going to be passed by both houses, but those people pushing them want to start a conversation on those issues.

BUTLER: And they want to play the blame game. “We have this great idea. And the Democrats killed it. The Democrats hate America. They killed this.” They killed the bill to abolish the IRS and get rid of your Social Security, and raise your sales tax 30 percent. It’s bonkers. But that’s the performative performances we’re going to see in the next couple of years.

ZIPPERER: There’s been a lot of talk and kind of bewilderment about [how] McCarthy had to make a lot of concessions—and everyone has to make these concessions when they’re doing that negotiation to be speaker, moreso when you have a really narrow majority. Pelosi did it, Boehner did it. Tim, you worked with McCarthy when you were at the state legislature. Can you tell us what you think of him, how does he operate, and how can we expect him to operate in what’s probably going to be a very contentious year on many fronts?

ANAYA: On that issue of the trade-offs and how to do it, we certainly all saw, thanks to C-SPAN, some of the wild things that people were talking about during that week. Well, if you think that’s wild, go behind closed doors when they’re off the record and hear the things that they’re talking about and asking for.

Nancy Pelosi had to do this; any party leader [does]. You have to, with a straight face, take these things seriously and cut a deal and get enough people and move forward. It’s been said that if you’re a party leader—moreso if you’re minority leader, but I think it applies if you’re the speaker— it’s like trying to herd feral cats.

We saw that all on display here. Now, Kevin, [here] is what he’ll be like. I worked for him for three years when he was Republican leader in Sacramento. I think we could expect two things.

One, he’s a very political person, and by that, I don’t mean he’s going to be this, that or the other in his press conferences, lobbing charges. Yes, there’ll be those times. But in terms of he’s a political animal, he knows every district, who the congressman is, who are the key players in their district, who are the up-and-coming people to recruit. Last year, he raised over $500 million to elect Republican candidates to the House. So this is someone who literally—even though we have this kind of new era of grassroots fundraising, a lot of people up there owe Kevin their jobs. That will help him. He’ll be attuned to how do we keep the seats we have and how do we move forward.

Now, the knock you’ll get on Kevin is, well, he’s not a policy guy. He’s not really interested in policy. And that might have been true earlier in his career. The times I have seen him lately, he is really deep on policy, and certainly if you see him in an interview now, all he’s talking about are policy issues. But I think that’s the thing of leadership. When you look at issues in Washington, the president’s agenda is always the Biden agenda. But the congressional agenda, well, it’s really not the McCarthy agenda or the Hakeem Jeffries agenda. It’s really the party’s agenda. And if you’re a good leader, yes, you’re out in front. But you empower your membership to be the ones who are carrying those bills and being the front people for their top priorities. So though Kevin may not be the one saying, “This is my plan and here are all the things I want to do,” it’s actually smart on his part to be saying, “Yes, I’m there and yes, I’m supporting my team.” But you’re really putting the key members up front, having that front and center moment in the spotlight.

So I think you’ll see a lot of that. Member management, as we would call it, is really the key function of a speaker aside from their policy duties, and I think he’ll do quite well at that despite this kind of wild environment he finds himself in.

ZIPPERER: One of the things that Nancy Pelosi was very good at was giving cover for her members, protecting moderate members who might have the more progressive members mad at them on abortion or gun control or something like that, because they’re from more purple districts. How do you think McCarthy will do on that?

ANAYA: He will get that. Yeah, that will be his inclination. But that’s one of the consequences of the rules changes that the rebels wanted to see, because when you have more votes on amendments on the floor and more debate, one of the consequences of that, if you’re a party leader, is members in tough races are going to have to take votes they don’t want to take.

So you’re going to see that those in competitive districts are who could be at risk of losing their seats in the next election. They’re going to have to take those votes.

ZIPPERER: Melissa, you interviewed John Boehner for the Club. He was a speaker who famously got frustrated dealing with his hard right, I guess the Tea Party.

BUTLER: Or the mainstream right.

ZIPPERER: Just like [some] Democrats thought Reaganites were extremists, and then Reaganites were the ones who were driven out of the party by the Trumpists.

CAEN: Revolutions always eat their own.

I can tell you, no one’s happier right now than John Boehner. He’s on the golf course laughing. He wrote this book called On the House—it’s a great book. He was such a great interview, because he was no longer speaker. You could talk about it. And he called them the “hell no caucus.”

He said the problem with them is that they know the crazier they are, the more it’s sort of like in sports, how everyone wants the “SportsCenter clip,” [showing] the big hits. They’re not doing the fundamentals. They just want that highlight clip, so they care more about that than they do the mundanity of performing government work.

When he grew up, his dad owned a bar. He basically said, “Look, I grew up in a bar. I’m used to dealing with crazy people. Deal with it.” And he literally said crazy. He’s like, “Crazy people come in, it’s fun. You do your best.” I asked him, “You raised money for them, and then they show up and they’d say all these things about you.” And he’s like, “Yeah.”

So it doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re going to dance with the one that brought them. If you’re angling for something else, a very tough reelection isn’t your goal; if being a pundit is your goal or some other kind of thing is your goal, that’s not necessarily going to be sort of a tie that’s going to hold you to [loyalty to the speaker].

But he said that it was very difficult and that you really couldn’t compete with these other pressures or other polls that were pulling your party members into a different place. You just kind of do your best and find that sort of Venn diagram. I think McCarthy might do something like let his caucus do whatever crazy stuff they want to do so they can go back and say they did it. But then “In exchange, when it comes to the important stuff, we expect you to line up.” I don’t know how that’s going to go, but that might be the plan. Might be right. The plan might be let them do their thing and then in exchange, they will raise the debt ceiling or whatever it is that we need them to do when we need them to do it.

Fingers crossed.

ZIPPERER: There’s a quote that’s attributed to [former Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn, “Son, if you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, . . . and then vote against them, you don’t deserve to be here.” That’s actually the PG version.

But there was some talk, as the country was watching this happen, as to whether [McCarthy] should make these concessions, get elected speaker, and then basically ignore the crazier claims or demands from some of the folks in his caucus.

BUTLER: I think that’s what’s going to happen. He’s made a lot of concessions. Allowing one member to get up and call for his head—that’s fine. But you have to have people vote for it. So I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen. But I think he wanted to be speaker. He said, “I’ll do anything to be speaker. And then once I get there, all bets are off. I’ll do what I want to do.”

And I think that’s what’s going to happen.

ANAYA: I would say on the one-member issue, we don’t know how things are going to take us, but if we get to that point, you still need 218 votes on the floor to do it. So if you’re Hakeem Jeffries, it’s in your interest to have kind of disarray, but is it in your interest to topple him as speaker and have someone else you can work with? Can you work with person X, Y or Z?

ZIPPERER: Do I have this right, only Republican members could move to vacate?

BUTLER: No, no.

ZIPPERER: Anyone? Democrats?

BUTLER: Anybody can.

I’m actually surprised during this whole thing that Jeffries didn’t go to [McCarthy] and say, “Look, let’s reach a power sharing agreement. You’re the speaker, but I’ve got six people that will vote for you to get this taken care of.” I’m surprised that didn’t happen.

ZIPPERER: At least what they were saying through the news was that the Democrats had all agreed not to do that.

BUTLER: Well, but then there’s always [deals] in the back room.

ZIPPERER: Speaking of [great] minds in Congress, let’s dive into the saga of George Santos, if that’s his real name. [Laughter.]

We’ll stick with you, Bob. The MSNBC talking heads and the political tweeters are, of course, very engaged in the Santos story.

Is this likely to be anything that gets down beyond the entertainment level of the political world or does it become one of those millstones around the neck of the Republicans nationally, always hanging over their heads as well?

BUTLER: I don’t think the Republican Party cares if you lie, because I think that’s the kind of disregard for the party nowadays. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you win. So I don’t think George Santos has anything to worry about until reelection. Come reelection, I think even a lot of the people who voted for him now are saying, “If I [had known] all this, I never would have voted for the guy.” So I think he may have a problem then. But the party itself, I don’t think the party really cares because, you know, he’s another vote.

But I’m wondering—we’ve got all these people that ask for pardons and stuff. You just wonder if the DOJ [Department of Justice] is going to one day come up and issue some indictments of these people that basically tried to help Trump overturn the election. I don’t know. But if that happens and if they’re from Democratic states, that could very quickly flip the House.

CAEN: Every day is just like, you pick up the phone, you look at the news and you’re like, “Oh, he killed a dog. Well, of course.” One of these days it’s going to be like [Santos pulls off a mask and reveals he’s] Vladimir Putin. [Laughter.]

I want to know where was his opponent? Because, look, there’s a lot of reasons why I don’t run for office, but one of them is I’m just convinced that my opponent would be out there talking to my first grade teacher about how I used to eat paste, and I don’t need the world to know that.

But you know what? A lot of us believe that there is usually the opponent, somebody, doing some vetting out there. And so that’s part of why this is so baffling. It’s just like that’s who I want to talk to.

ZIPPERER: Well, apparently a lot of criticism has been aimed at the head of the Democratic Party in New York state, because they had this information, it was out, or they had some of the information. And frankly, if you can’t take a small kernel of information of bad news for your opponent and make it into a big thing, you don’t deserve to be in politics, not in the big leagues.

CAEN: But there’s a few ways to kind of deal with this. I know people are mad that he got seated, but the truth is—there’s two things [regarding excluding a House member]. One is exclusion from the House, and the other is expulsion. So to exclude someone [means] that you can’t even take your seat. You have to have failed the three tests—citizen for seven years and a resident of your state and be a certain age. So if you were those things, they kind of have to seat you. There’s really no other way to prevent someone [from taking their seat once they win their election].

But once you’re in, to kick you out, then that’s a two-thirds vote and that’s something that they can do. I think [members of the House Ethics] Committee are investigating now. People think that the cops should come. But the truth is there’s very little that you can do once somebody is already in. If they’ve met those requirements and they’ve been elected, the place to look is if when you go to sign your candidate statement, whether or not he attested to certain things under penalty of perjury that weren’t true. If that’s the case, then the D.A. or secretary of state of New York—I know in California that would be, I think, the secretary of state—but the attorney general could come after you.

So those are the only real avenues that you have, aside from, as you point out, reelection, which can seem like a long time. But it’s not that long when it comes to being in Washington. And as soon as the dust settles, you’re already running for reelection. So hopefully this short national nightmare will be over soon.

BUTLER: You mentioned the investigation; [it] didn’t go to the Ethics Committee, the one that Kevin’s going to disband.

CAEN: Oh, is he disbanding the Ethics [Committee]? I think he’s putting together something to—

BUTLER: It’s not going to be very ethically sound.

ZIPPERER: Maybe Matt Gaetz will chair it. [Laughter.]

Democrats probably don’t want [George Santos] out of office for the next year.

ANAYA: That’s right. You want him front and center every day; you want the albatross for the next election. You know, everybody who took money from him or gave him money or sat next to him on the floor or voted with him or [was] seen anywhere with him—that’s gold, really. But I think you’re right. This is a question that is going to be solved.

Obviously, he has no shame, so he’s not going to step down. Congress doesn’t exactly have a great track record over the years, including recent times, of investigating their own. So I wouldn’t put much faith in that. It’s going to be whether on his campaign reports that he said something fraudulent or [there are] questions about what his spending was. That’s the way to go.

I don’t know about you all, but last year one of the shows I’d binged on Netflix was [the drama series] Inventing Anna. And Inventing Anna has a whole story like this. But in the [real] world, we may have found the second season of Inventing Anna