The expulsion of George Santos from Congress this week for his myriad fabrications and potential crimes, is a significant and welcome step towards rebuilding the reputation not just of that institution, but of American institutions in general.
Yes, it would have been better for him to resign, but this vote sends a message that even in our permissive age, not every scandal can be survived.
In 1987, Joe Biden was forced out of the presidential race for having plagiarized a paper in college. In that same year, Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his nomination to the Supreme Court when it was discovered he had smoked marijuana while an associate professor at Harvard Law.
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In 2023, Biden is president of the United States, still indulging in frequent fanciful claims, and not only is weed widely legal, one of the industry’s top lobbyists is John Boehner, a former speaker of the House of Representatives.
It has been a quiet but consequential sea change.
In just 35 years, the moral, ethical and professional standards for people who are a public face for American institutions have completely collapsed.
In Congress, New Jersey Democrat Senator Bob Menendez still wanders the corridors of Capitol Hill, with access to classified materials, while under indictment for being a foreign agent. And the institution does nothing.
At least Republicans in the House are capable of holding one of their own to account.
In journalism, professional face-plants abound, from Russiagate to COVID-19 hysteria, and more recently a completely bogus story about Israel bombing a hospital in Gaza that the New York Times sourced to Hamas terrorists.
Again, zero consequences.
Turning to the public schools, test scores are plummeting throughout the country and, instead of improving education, many districts simply lower the standards, often while teaching a radical progressive agenda on race and gender that many parents find objectionable.
These educators win awards and teachers union bosses like Randi Weingarten keep on cashing their hefty paychecks and going on television.
Pick an institution, any institution, and you will see the same pattern, but there is something else you will also see.
In 1979, 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup had a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in Congress. Today that number is an anemic 8%. In the same period, newspapers saw a drop from 51% to just 18% and public schools went from 53% to 26%.
Another word for confidence is trust, and today we live in a country where vast majorities do not trust the government, the news, or their kids' school. It is not sustainable, and it is tearing us apart.
Another way to think about trust in institutions is as trust in a shared framework of reality, and without that we have no way of addressing festering problems such as education, or the southern border, or crime.
We have no shared set of facts to put confidence in. Anything we disagree with can be dismissed by assuming it is misleading or offered in bad faith.
There is no substitute for trust in institutions, no technology or fact-checking system can hold them to account, and after all, why would we trust those any more than we do the ivory towers and halls of power?
No, trust must be earned by the institutions themselves, and the only way to do that is with much-higher standards.
These days any PR flack worth 50 cents can make stealing some words back in law school or puffing a joint at a party in the ’70s go away faster than a Ferrari zipping over a speed bump.
And yes, today it seems harsh that such relatively minor offenses could disqualify a person from high public office, but is it really?
Maybe in the America of 1987, Biden’s plagiarism was a red flag – if he was capable of that, might he have been capable of other dishonest acts, such as, I don’t know, say, influence peddling?
Maybe that high standard worked exactly as intended.
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Maybe, if you print a false account of Israel committing a war crime based solely on the word of Hamas butchers who burned babies alive a few days earlier, you shouldn’t have a byline ever again.
Maybe if you are leading an education system that struggles to teach kids to read or do basic math, you should be shown the door, not the glittering stairway to greater administrative power.
Until the American people once again believe that those with such power will face consequences for lying to them and failing them, as Santos has, there will be no renaissance of public trust in our institutions.
Much like the old joke about 25 lawyers lost at sea, the expulsion of Geroge Santos from Congress is a good start.
But that is only a start. All of our institutions need to set a much-higher bar for conduct and performance, even at the risk of harsh penalties. Without that, this all-important trust will never be restored.
