Happy Tuesday.
While the rest of the country is already well into the workweek, Congress is just getting started. Must be nice.
But as they drag their feet on a growing list of priorities that Americans demand, from the SAVE America Act to funding the Department of Homeland Security, there’s at least one thing they could get done quickly. Something simple that shouldn’t drag out any longer than it already has.
Expelling Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.
It’s been nearly six months since the Florida Democrat was charged with stealing $5 million in FEMA disaster relief funds, money prosecutors say she used to bankroll the very campaign that got her into Congress. That primary campaign was won by five votes, and in a seat where that’s effectively the election, it meant the seat and everything that comes with it. The salary, the staff, the offices, the travel, and the power that she’s been enjoying ever since.
Republicans didn’t wait around when it was one of their own. They expelled George Santos with a razor-thin majority and gave up the seat.
Now months have passed, and she is still there.
And during that time, she’s been trying to cover it all up.
Her official congressional portrait already showed her sporting a roughly $100,000 yellow diamond ring—one prosecutors say she bought with the very FEMA funds at the center of the case. By Christmas, I caught her posting the same image with the ring inconspicuously photoshopped out.
Not suspicious at all.
Hellbound and Down 