When is enough enough?

In U.S. politics, where’s the line for lying?

Republican Rep. George Santos of New York is a degenerate liar.

But whether he should be allowed to keep his seat is not for party functionaries or members of Congress to decide. It’s for the people of New York's 3rd Congressional District. This is how it works in our constitutional republic. Voters get final say, as they should. Also, leaving the decision to Santos's constituents will go a long way toward answering that increasingly pertinent question: When is enough enough for voters?

Santos claims he worked for Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs says it has no record of his employment.

Santos said he served as an asset manager for Citigroup. Citigroup says this is not true.

Santos said he graduated from Baruch College in 2010. Baruch College officials say they have no record of anyone by his name, or any variation of it, graduating on or around that year.

Santos claims he founded an animal rescue nonprofit group, Friends of Pets United, which has saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. The Internal Revenue Service said it has no record of any organization by that name.

Santos said a company he owned, which he declined to name, lost four employees in 2016 in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. A review of the 49 victims of the shooting shows none of them worked for any of the companies claimed by Santos in any of his personal biographies.

Santos said, "9/11 claimed my mother’s life." His mother died in 2016.

Santos told supporters he is Jewish. He even told them he is a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors. Later, after it was revealed he is not, in fact, Jewish, he asserted he "never claimed to be Jewish" but that he is "Jew-ish."

The reaction from journalists and politicos has been an appropriate one. It’s a mixture of shock, indignation, amusement, and a little embarrassment for not having uncovered Santos’s many lies before the 2022 midterm elections. Critics have called on Santos to resign. Others have suggested Republican leadership take direct action should the freshman lawmaker fail to cross the bar of personal decency and humility. The calls for Santos’s resignation raise a unique and timely question: If lying is an offense for which one should be denied public office, where does this leave the many, many liars who make up the federal government?

Left-wing activist Nina Turner put it well when she said, "If every member of Congress that lied to voters to get elected had to resign, there would be a bipartisan mass-resignation."

She has a point. Indeed, when it comes to politics, lying is as common as a handshake. Voters recognize this. They largely tolerate it. But where is the line? A few fibs? A couple of white lies? A mulligan for complete fabrications? At what point do voters say, "Enough"?

Democratic Sen. Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut used to boast he served in Vietnam. This isn’t an ungenerous paraphrasing. In 2008, his exact words were, "I served in Vietnam." He never served in Vietnam. In 2003, when referring to Marines who had just returned from overseas operations, he kept using the word "we," as in, "When we returned ..." This is as brazen a lie as any told by Santos. But do the people of Connecticut care?

Up until around 2018, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told anyone who’d listen — school administrators and voters alike — she is of Cherokee heritage, a self-awarded designation that certainly didn’t hurt her career opportunities. Fordham Law Review, with no objection from Warren herself, billed her as Harvard Law School's "first woman of color." Harvard Law cited her supposed Native American heritage specifically in response to criticism the school lacks minority representation. For nearly a decade, Warren identified as a "minority" in the Association of American Law Schools’s deskbook. Warren is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.

The senator has since "apologized,” saying she’s sorry for the "harm" she may have caused actual Native Americans. However, it’s worth remembering that in all the years Warren claimed "minority" status, she had exactly as much evidence as Santos did when he claimed he was Jewish, which is to say none at all. In fact, in 2012, before the senator eventually dropped the Cherokee charade altogether, she was pressed for proof of her alleged ancestral background. Her response? "My papaw had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do," she said, citing remarks her aunt allegedly made. This is every bit as funny and audacious as Santos’s "Jew-ish" defense. But do the voters of Massachusetts care? If not, why not?

Then, of course, there’s President Joe Biden, whose lies are too many in number for a full accounting in a non-longform opinion article.

Biden claimed he was arrested in South Africa after he demanded a meeting with a then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. He was not. Biden claimed he met with the leaders of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after an antisemitic terrorist attack in October 2018 left 11 worshipers dead. He did not. He claimed he marched with civil rights protesters. He did not. He claimed he was arrested with civil rights protesters. He was not. Biden claimed that every time he has run for office, he has done so with the backing of the NAACP. He has not. Biden said that as vice president, he awarded his late uncle the Purple Heart, at his father’s urging. Biden served as vice president from 2008 to 2012. His father died in 2002. His uncle died in 1999. Biden has said on multiple occasions that his son, Beau, "lost his life in Iraq." Beau did not die in Iraq. He died of brain cancer in the United States, nearly six years after returning from deployment. Biden claimed he was once in a helicopter that was "forced down" into "the superhighway of terror" between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was not. Biden claimed he was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1965 by the late Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs of Delaware. The late senator’s archives show nothing of the sort. Biden claimed the Obama administration, in which he served for eight years as vice president, did not "lock people up in cages." It did. He claimed that "immediately, the moment [the Iraq War] started, I came out against the war at that moment." He did not. He claimed he was "shot at" during trips to the Green Zone in Iraq. This did not happen (Biden clarified later: "I was near where a shot landed"). The president claimed he led the charge against Slobodan Milosevic. He did not. He claimed he was the first in his family to go to university. He was not. He said he predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He did not.

In the late 1980s, when Biden first ran for president, he told voters he attended law school at Syracuse University on a full academic scholarship. He did not. He told the same audience he finished in the top half of his class. He told them he was named the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. He told them he graduated from Delaware with three undergraduate degrees. Every single one of these claims is false.

Should Biden resign for these lies? For some of them? When is enough enough? Voters are apparently comfortable with the outright lies Biden has told over the course of his 30-plus years in office, comfortable enough to put him in the White House. Hell, they were comfortable enough with Donald Trump.

Why, then, are we being told the Santos situation is different, different enough as to require a unique response? Why should we care more about this obscure congressman than the president of the United States? Why are there scores of reporters and pundits reacting to the Santos story with remarks along the lines of, "I’ve never seen anything like this"?

Perhaps the answer lies in the time frame. Perhaps the thing that makes the Santos situation stand out is that he managed somehow to cram into a single campaign season the volume and type of lies that took Joe Biden and even Donald Trump literal decades to accumulate. Santos has no business filling a seat in the most powerful deliberative body in the world. Brazen liars cannot be trusted with power. Taking a page from Nina Turner’s book, this applies to a great number of state and federal legislators. But whether these liars should remain in office is not for fellow lawmakers or the commentariat to decide. It is for the people who put the liars in office in the first place.

Which brings us back to the central question: When is enough enough?

Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the program director of the National Journalism Center.