Michael Gold

Thanks for having me.

I've been thinking a lot about what's happening on the Hill this week.

And for me, this is a story about the way that Congress chooses or doesn't choose to police itself.

I think what we're seeing this week is extraordinary.

Two members of the House resigning within an hour of each other after a lot of pressure.

But it took us a while to get to this point.

And I think the way that it happened really says a lot about kind of the intersection between our politics and the way we expect our politicians to behave once they're in office.

Yeah, so I'm going to answer your question with another question.

Please.

Do you remember George Santos?

So let me take you back to 2023.

George Santos arrives in Congress facing a cloud of questions, most of them sparked by my colleague Grace Ashford and I, who reported that he had lied about his background, where his campaign money came from.

He claimed to be this big Wall Street guy, and no one seemed to really know where the money was or what had happened to it.

And so when he arrived, there were a lot of members of Congress who said, this man lied his way into office, and we don't think he should be in the House.

And Kevin McCarthy, who was the speaker at the time, said, we can't kick somebody out of the House based on newspaper articles.

We don't have enough here.

There are investigations we can take.

And if you all really want to figure out what's going on with George Santos, let's do an ethics committee investigation.

So they do.

And traditionally, Ethics Committee investigations move very slowly.