Editors’ Blog

A big question we turn to now is who will be the next Speaker of the House. This should not be a question. The leader of the Republican opposition for the last four years should obviously become speaker. But, as we know, it’s not that simple.

Tonight we heard for the first time that McCarthy has agreed to allow motions to vacate as part of his quest to get the votes to become speaker. This is a technical parliamentary tool but an extremely important one. It allows any member at any time to force a vote on firing McCarthy as speaker. There are various potential versions of this and it has to do with what is called a “privileged motion.” The latest reports suggest McCarthy has finally agreed to this, something he has insisted he would never agree to.

The competition was fierce. Voter comments got messy. Some of our winners only eked out a victory by a few percentage points. But after a free and fair election, and more than 12,000 votes cast, we’re ready to announce 2022’s greatest losers.

What better way to round out the year than by toasting the scoundrels who did the worst the best? It’s TPM tradition, after all. Ever since Duke Cunningham — in all of his shameless glory, complete with bribe menu, lava lamp, and yacht party — brought us into a new era of public corruption, reveling in the moments when public figures reveal their true, often corrupt and comically grimy colors is what we do best.

Without further ado, join us in our celebration of this years winners — one of the most cartoonishly dishonorable cast of characters we’ve raised a toast to yet.

No promises, but here’s to (hopefully) less of the drama that is Manchin and Sinema in 2023.

Thanks for a great year of podcasting! Happy holidays ❄️🎙️⛄️- The Josh Marshall Podcast crew pic.twitter.com/1mdOQk5bOV

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) December 28, 2022

See you next year!

There are so many lies and so many questions swirling around George Santos that I wanted to take a moment before the end of the day to draw a few connections for you between the pieces we reported today and some other, earlier work by our team and others. As noted, the big question is where on earth all this money came from, if it exists at all.

Santos says he made this crazy amount of money by putting together extremely wealthy people who want to buy and sell things to each other. A private jet. A yacht. He says he got the rolodex to do this from his time at Linkbridge Investors. We’re still looking into Linkbridge. It’s a company that says it puts on closed-door conferences for top investors to network. We’re still trying to learn more about it.

But it’s what he did immediately after Linkbridge that has our attention. He went to work for a place called Harbor City which was pretty quickly flagged by the SEC, which alleged it was a ponzi scheme. A lot of the money from Harbor City is still unaccounted for. And there are multiple links between the Devolder Organization, the outfit that made Santos as much as $11 million over 18 months, and former executives at Harbor City.

As the Oscars holds its in memoriam each year, so too will the Golden Dukes this year, complete with a bit of dark spin. We would never dance on anyone’s actual graves (probably), but their political graves are fair game.

2022 gifted us a lot of losers who we can now celebrate as winners — in their unscrupulous, unhinged, and ultimately unelectable glory. Introducing the Golden Dukes Forgotten Heroes, an in memoriam to all of our favorite scoundrels who never quite made it to elected office. The 2022 midterms, in all its Big Lie-fueled insanity, gifted us hundreds of options for whacky candidates we will miss the most. Some may run for office again. But in our hearts they’ll always be losers.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the committee’s legacy and final report, the antics of Kari Lake and the ongoing saga of incoming Rep. George Santos (R-NY).

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

The far-right domestic terrorist leader who was the lead organizer of the plot to kidnap and assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been sentenced to just under 20 years in prison for his role in the plot. Barry Croft, of Delaware, who said he wanted to foment a civil war in the US was, according to the government, the “spiritual leader” of the group, much “some sheikh in ISIS might be.”

On Monday George Santos gave an interview to the New York news outlet City and State. It’s a softball interview in which Santos continues to blame “elites” at The New York Times for making him lie about his resume. He basically minimizes all his lies to nothing. He was someone who “put a little bit of fluff in their resume” and dared any member of Congress to go through the scrutiny he has and come out any better. As you can see, its just a speedball of deflection and lying. But he’s a pathological liar who won’t stop lying. That’s kind of old news. As I noted yesterday, the real story is the list of potential criminal issues which may and I’m increasing thinking will bring him down. The big one is the money. Where did he get the money? Since he won’t shut up, we’re getting more information from him, all of it preposterous. Let’s run through where things stand.

WaPo has a solid rundown of the state of the Santos story after last night’s interview in The New York Post and another live interview Santos did last night. I want to give you a quick assessment of where this story likely goes next, what matters and what does not. On the endless list of fabrications in Santos’s resume and biography, his response has essentially been “LOL, whatever.” Yeah, I lied. Sorry. But who cares?

Narrowly speaking, he’s right. There’s no law that says you have to be honest with voters about your background or almost anything else. There’s no federal recall. The recourse to this behavior is either at the ballot box in two years or in the hands of his colleagues in the House who could expel him from the body. But expulsion is extremely rare. Only five members of the House have ever been expelled and three of those were tied to secession in 1861. In essence, it’s happened twice in U.S. history. It’s slightly more common for the House to refuse to seat a new member.

Absent getting shamed out of office for being an inveterate liar and weasel, the issue will come down to potential criminal conduct. So let’s run down the most likely points of vulnerability on that front.

Morning Memo (our morning briefing), Where Things Stand (our evening Editors’ Blog update), and The Weekender (our weekend newsletter) will all return in 2023.

In the meantime, we hope you’ll join us in celebrating the most wonderful time of the year: The Golden Dukes.