In her weekly op-ed rant in The Wall Street Journal, February 4/5, Peggy Noonan dedicates her concluding section to attacking the presence in the House of Representatives of Rep. George Santos, of New York's Third Congressional District on Long Island, demanding his head, as it were.

Previously, Ms. Noonan devoted her weekly WSJ space to praising the sanity and leadership of the former House Republican member from Wyoming who turned on party and constituents, Liz Cheney.  There Ms. Cheney's constituents took the decision of House membership in their own hands, and now (thankfully) Ms. Cheney is ex-representative Cheney.

Peggy Noonan addresses the Goldwater Institute in 2016.

Peculiar Peggy leads into the matter of the Santos situation this way: "I want to finish with George Santos.  Really, in every way I want us to finish with him.  History will notice his little story."

Noonan continues, lacking all nuance. 

Again, it is a mistake to let him be a member of Congress. Speaker Kevin McCarthy says the people have spoken. He repeated it Tuesday: 'The voters have elected him. He'll have a voice here in Congress while investigations play out."

Interjects Noonan in nuisance mode: "This is deeply stupid."  A WSJ columnist since Y2K, she provides us with this example of projection of personal stupidity:

George Santos was never elected to Congress. A nice young man, 34-years old, a conservative who'd struggled against the odds — the son of immigrants, born in some want, an ethnic minority whose grandparents fled the Holocaust. He rose to be educated at one of New York's greatest private schools, to be a star athlete at a great college, earned a masters in business administration, forged on to become an impressive figure in finance with positions at Goldman Sachs and Citicorp. He came to own mansions on Long Island. Only in America...

Pugnacious Peg went on: 

That's who was elected.  That's who won, by 8 points.  But that man didn't exist.

To be elected to the House of Representatives, however, one need not have a mansion, not even mention of employment at Goldman Sachs, on one's résumé.  Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 57 that "[n]o qualification of wealth, of birth, of religious faith, or of civil profession is permitted to fetter the judgment or disappoint the inclination of the people."

In Federalist No. 52, Madison expanded on Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, setting forth the qualifications for House membership: 

A representative of the United States must be of the age of twenty-five years: must have been seven years a citizen of the United States; must, at the time of his election, be an inhabitant of the State he is to represent, and, during the time of his service, must be in no office under the United States.

If Peggy Noonan rejects this declaration of the basic qualifications of House membership, she is claiming the right to countermand the Constitution and the views of the Framers.  Such a mindset "is deeply stupid" — not to say incredibly arrogant. 

By the way, the strict interpretation of qualifications for House membership was endorsed by the Supreme Court in Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).  In that case, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was expelled from the House by majority vote.  The High Court, in a 7-1 majority opinion (Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking for the majority) acknowledged that a duly elected member could be expelled from the House of Representatives for "disorderly Behavior," but only in compliance with Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution, which requires "the Concurrence of two thirds" of the members.

Has Rep. George Santos exhibited "disorderly behavior" since he became a House member?  In the event that Peggy Noonan claims she is offended by his membership in the House, I sense that the expulsion of Mr. Santos from the House of Representatives would descend to the level of...political insurrection.  The proper political thing to do would be to let Mr. Santos serve out the term to which he was elected in peace, and see if his constituents believe he should be returned to the House, if not elected to even higher office.

This, however, is not to say that Mr. Santos will serve out the two years to which he has been elected.  When it comes to caving in under Democrat and media pressure, Republicans tend to be masters at the art of cravenness.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 license.