House Republicans allegedly have another George Santos-level liar on their hands
The thing about House Republican and serial fraudster George Santos is that while he’s an extreme case, he’s not an outlier. Today’s House Republicans are all frauds by nature; some of them are more subtle in how they’ve gone about it. For instance last week the Washington Post reported that like Santos, new House Republican Anna Paulina Luna also allegedly changed her name and pretended to be Jewish. Now yet another House Republican is under the microscope for allegedly faking large parts of his life and identity.
House Republican Andy Ogles just took office last month representing Tennessee’s 5th District. Now local TV network NewsChannel 5 is alleging that Ogles has falsified large portions of his professional resume and personal history, falsely portraying himself as an economist for instance. It also appears that Ogles may be blocking his Middle Tennessee State University from revealing what he actually studied and whether he graduated.
The list of lies that Andy Ogles is alleged to have made up about himself just goes on and on. We’ll see if the national political media picks up on this story, and if so, what else it’ll able to dig up and substantiate. But for now it’s clear that something doesn’t add up about Ogles’ professional and personal claims.
Of course these kinds of lies alone don’t add up to a criminal offense. George Santos is under local and federal criminal investigation because his web of lies includes a highly suspicious money trail that may trace back to an accused Ponzi scheme. As of now there are no allegations of criminal activity against Ogles.
For that matter Ogles is in a fairly safe R+9 House district, meaning if he were forced to resign, he would probably just be replaced with another Republican. In contrast, if Santos is forced out before the end of his term, the Democrats would be favored to win that seat in a special election.
But there’s a larger picture emerging here, and it’s one that’s entirely expected. The Republican Party was already corrupt to its core before Donald Trump took it over, which is why he was able to take it over. But Trump’s influence over the party resulted in an “anything goes” approach, in which Republican Party leaders either don’t have the tools in place to find out, or don’t want to know, that some of their own candidates are essentially fictional characters.
Even now that Trump’s control over the party has waned, and he’s mostly just sitting there rotting in Florida while awaiting indictment, the party seems to be more structurally dysfunctional than ever.
If the Republican Party were still functional – even corruptly functional – it would have caught early on that its own candidates like Santos and Ogles were allegedly falsifying their histories, and it could have replaced them early on with other candidates who weren’t such liabilities. Instead the party is letting these kinds of clowns become its nominees, and now that some of them have won, it’s stuck with them in office, lacking the intestinal fortitude to get rid of them.
As a result, these types are creating endless negative headlines, not only for themselves, but for the entire Republican House. It’s serving to drown out whatever messaging House Republicans were hoping to get across during this term. And at the rate things are going, the list of new House Republicans with juicy and humiliating scandals is likely to keep growing. It’s an embarrassment for the country, but it’s an outright disaster for the Republicans. And as long as they refuse to clean up their own messes, it’s just handing the Democrats leverage for retaking the House in 2024.
