Earlier this week at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was spotted telling out Rep. George Santos (R-NY), “You don’t belong here.”
Apparently the senator’s words cut deep, with Santos questioning Romney’s Mormon values as a result.
“It’s not the first time in history that I’ve been told to shut up and go to the back of the room, especially by people who come from a privileged background, and it’s not gonna be the last” Santos told reporters on Wednesday. “And I’m never gonna shut up and go to the back of the room.”
“I think it’s reprehensible that the senator would say such a thing to me in the demeaning way he said it,” Santos continued.
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“It wasn’t very Mormon of him,” he said before walking off. Romney is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. Santos is Catholic.
Since he was elected last November, Santos has been caught lying about much of his life story, including attending Baruch College and New York University and working for major financial firms like Goldman Sachs. He has been accused of a variety of crimes and misdeeds, including stealing expensive clothes and phones from former roommates and boyfriends, writing fraudulent checks in Brazil, sexually harassing a staffer in Congress, embezzling $3000 from a dog’s surgery fund resulting in the dog’s death, and various campaign finance rules violations.
Earlier this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) confirmed that Santos is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.
Romney told reporters after the State of the Union that he was bothered by Santos’s lack of shame.
“I didn’t expect he’d be standing there trying to shake hands with every senator and the president of the United States,” Romney said. “Given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and the people coming into the room.”
“He says he, you know, that he embellished his record. Look, embellishing is saying you got an A when you got an A-,” the senator said. “Lying is saying you graduated from a college that you didn’t even attend and he shouldn’t be in Congress and they’re gonna go through the process and hopefully get him out.”
“But he shouldn’t be there and if he had any shame at all he wouldn’t be there.”