The House of Representatives expelled New York Republican George Santos on Friday by a bipartisan 311-114 vote, making him only the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be removed by his colleagues. Two members voted present and eight did not vote. The action followed a House Ethics Committee investigation that said it found substantial evidence Santos knowingly violated federal criminal laws and other standards governing congressional conduct.

The vote was extraordinary not simply because expulsions are rare, but because Santos has not been convicted of the federal criminal charges pending against him. That distinction became the central procedural argument for many of the 114 members who opposed removal. Supporters countered that the Constitution gives each chamber authority to punish and expel members with a two-thirds vote and that the House’s own investigative record was sufficiently extensive to justify action without waiting for a criminal trial.

An ethics inquiry changed the House calculus

The decisive development was the Ethics Committee’s Nov. 16 investigative report. The bipartisan panel said its investigative subcommittee had assembled more than 170,000 pages of documents, interviewed witnesses and examined campaign and financial records. In a joint statement, Chairman Michael Guest, R-Miss., and ranking Democrat Susan Wild of Pennsylvania said the evidence warranted referral to the Justice Department and that Santos’ conduct merited public condemnation.

The report alleged that Santos used campaign funds for personal purposes, deceived donors about how money would be spent, reported fictitious loans and engaged in transactions that obscured the source or use of political money. It also described expenditures at luxury retailers, casinos, spas and other personal destinations. Santos rejected the report’s conclusions, describing the inquiry as biased and arguing that the committee had not afforded him adequate process.

That report moved a significant number of Republicans who had opposed earlier expulsion attempts. According to the Washington Post, nearly half of House Republicans ultimately supported removal, despite warnings from some GOP leaders that the chamber was establishing a difficult precedent by expelling a member before a criminal conviction. The final tally comfortably exceeded the two-thirds threshold required by the Constitution.

Criminal allegations remain separate from congressional discipline

Santos is also fighting a federal prosecution in New York involving fraud, money laundering, identity theft and false-statement allegations. He has pleaded not guilty. The criminal case and the House’s disciplinary process operate under different standards: prosecutors must prove criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt in court, while the House decides for itself whether a member’s conduct is incompatible with continued service.

That difference was repeatedly emphasized during the debate. The Associated Press reported that opponents of expulsion, including some members who strongly criticized Santos, worried that removing a member before conviction could make future expulsions more dependent on political judgment. Supporters argued that the Ethics Committee process supplied an independent congressional record and that the allegations went directly to the integrity of the office.

Representative Zach Nunn, an Iowa Republican who voted to expel Santos, said in a statement that elected officials must be held to a high ethical standard and that the committee’s findings crossed that line. Other Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, voted against expulsion, reflecting the institutional concern over acting before a jury has resolved the criminal case.

A historically rare sanction

Before Friday, only five House members had been expelled. Three were removed during the Civil War for disloyalty to the Union, and two others were expelled after criminal convictions in the modern era. Santos therefore enters a very small category, and the circumstances of his removal will likely be cited in future debates over the chamber’s disciplinary authority.

The political effect is immediate. Santos’ seat is vacant and New York must hold a special election to fill it, temporarily narrowing an already small Republican House majority. His departure also ends a tumultuous first term that had been dominated by questions about claims he made about his biography, employment and education, followed by increasingly serious campaign-finance and criminal allegations.

Santos left the Capitol shortly after the vote and continued to deny wrongdoing. The Guardian reported that he said the House had set a dangerous precedent and maintained that he should have been permitted to defend himself through the judicial process. His criminal case now proceeds without the separate question of whether he should remain a member of Congress.

The precedent will outlast the member

The House’s decision resolves Santos’ status but not the institutional argument. One side sees the vote as an assertion that Congress need not tolerate documented misconduct until a criminal prosecution reaches judgment. The other sees the absence of a conviction as an important boundary that should rarely be crossed. Both positions are likely to shape how members assess future cases.

What is clear from Friday’s roll call is that the Ethics Committee report changed the balance. A chamber that had previously rejected efforts to expel Santos concluded, after its own bipartisan investigation, that the conduct described was serious enough to justify its most severe disciplinary sanction. The result was not close: 311 members voted that Santos could no longer remain in the House, ending his tenure less than a year after he was sworn in.