On the campaign trail, Representative Elect George Santos, a Republican who eventually flipped a Democratic seat in New York, misled voters about his work and educational history, his family’s heritage, his past philanthropic endeavors and his business dealings.
His litany of fabrications has raised the question of whether Mr. Santos, who was elected last month to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeastern Queens, will be allowed to take his seat next week when Congress meets or be thrown out once he has been sworn in. .
But House Republican leaders, who have so far remained silent amid ongoing questions about Mr. Santos, are unlikely to punish him in any significant way. Even if they could force him out of Congress, it would lead to a special election in a rocking chair, which would be a potential blow to the party’s already precarious majority.
And Mr. Santos has pledged to vote next week for Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, as speaker, as Mr. McCarthy faces an uprising on the right and needs every vote he can get.
Here are some of the options for addressing Mr. Santos’ falsehoods.
Can the House refuse to seat him?
The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that a person who met the constitutional requirements for office in the House of Representatives could not be denied a seat once elected. In that case, Powell v. McCormack, the court suggested that a permissible remedy for the House, should it attempt to exclude one of its duly elected members, would be a vote to expel the legislature once he or she was seated.
House leaders could, in theory, work together to try to defy that precedent and force Mr. Santos to challenge the move in court. But Republicans don’t care.
Can he be deported?
In theory yes. Practically probably not.
Article I, Section 5 of the constitution states that “each house may determine the rules of its procedure, punish its members for disorderly conduct, and, by two-thirds consent, expel a member.”
While the Constitution grants the House broad powers to expel any of its own members, there has long been internal debate over whether lawmakers can be suspended for conduct prior to taking office.
For example, some Republicans argued that Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene should not have been stripped of her committees for her social media posts from before she was elected. In the posts, she supported the execution of top Democrats, suggested a number of school shootings were carried out in secret by government actors, and repeatedly traded in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
But it’s unlikely that House Republican leaders would want to evict Santos in the first place.
Only 20 members of Congress have been evicted from both chambers: five from the House and 15 from the Senate, according to the Congressional Research Service. Seventeen of those expulsions were related to disloyalty to the United States during the Civil War era, which did not occur until after the secession of the Confederate states.
The others — including the most recent case, the 2002 eviction of Ohio Democrat Representative James A. Traficant Jr. — occurred after representatives were convicted of public corruption charges.
Can he be removed from office in any other way?
Mr Santos could choose to resign if he is pressured by party leaders to do so, or if he is subject to an ethics review and no longer wants the costs of legal representation and stress associated with those proceedings wear.
There is no mechanism for voters to recall a member of the House of Representatives.
What punishments can the House hand down?
The House Ethics Committee, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers historically shy away from punishing their peers, has not commented on Mr. Santos’ case and remains in a state of uncertainty until a new Congress takes place on Jan. 3. drag on for months or even years and rarely result in significant punishment.
Should the House Republican leadership want to impose some kind of punishment, they could censor him, a usually symbolic gesture that requires a simple majority vote and sometimes comes with a fine. After a lawmaker is censured, he or she must stand in the well of the House while a reprimand is read.
Republican leaders in the House could also choose not to place Mr. Santos on committees or demote him to backward committees.