As was expected, Congress followed through with the expulsion of Rep. George Santos on Friday.

The move raises an uncomfortable question that is going to be with us for the foreseeable future: What should institutions such as Congress do when “We the People” get it wrong? 

The voters of New York’s 3^rd Congressional District had no reason to be surprised by the fabulous fabrications of the Republican they sent to the House.

While the New York Times and the rest of the national media made Santos a household name after the election, local newspaper The North Shore Leader had the scoop before Election Day, reporting on Santos’s financial misrepresentations and comparing him to the scheming villain of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.“

The information was out there, but the people of the 3^rd District chose not to act on it.

Whether that was a matter of civic laziness or a cynical calculation that they still preferred the lying Republican to his Democratic opponent does not change the fact that the people made a choice. Such choices should not be overridden lightly. 

But there is a time to overrule We the People. 

The House of Representatives sets its own rules, including standards for membership.

That the House has the power to expel Rep. Santos is not in question. And, even though one might be tempted to invoke former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s famous dictum following his own electoral defeat — “The people have spoken, and now they must be punished!” — there is a good argument for expelling Santos, whose troubles are criminal as well as ethical.

Congress exercising some internal authority and, perhaps in the process, rediscovering a modicum of self-respect (as opposed to self-importance, which Congress had oodles of) would be a healthful thing for our politics overall.

But it also raises dangers beyond depriving the American public of Bowen Yang’s gleefully bitchy impersonation of Rep. Santos on “Saturday Night Live.”

Given the current destructive habit of every congressional majority exploiting every parliamentary chokepoint, from confirmation hearings to bills funding basic government operations, for maximal short-term partisan benefit, we can expect House Republicans to seek tit-for-tat payback at the first opportunity, however slight the cause.

We also can expect Democrats to look for further advantageous openings. 

That danger of such a dynamic grows even more urgent once we move beyond the relatively straightforward question of Congress policing its own.

The recent attempts to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot under the “insurrection clause” of the 14^th Amendment raises substantive issues.

The insurrection provision was inserted with an eye toward keeping former Confederate leaders out of power after the Civil War, but the language of the law does not limit its application to such figures.

It is true that Donald Trump has not been convicted of insurrection; neither was Jefferson Davis. But there have been more than 160 felony convictions stemming from the January 6 riot — which was part of an effort to enact a coup d’état by nullifying the lawful election of Joe Biden — and some of those convictions have been for the charge of seditious conspiracy, which is to say, for insurrection. 

While a Colorado judge has for the moment blocked the attempt to bar Trump from seeking election in 2024, there is a reasonable reading of the law in question that would seem to justify his exclusion.

What is lacking isn’t a rationale but a process: The 14^th Amendment does not make it clear who has the authority to bar a candidate from office, whether appeal is possible and what form it would take, etc.

There is a strong prudential argument against blocking Trump from the ballot — that it would be seen as illegitimate, partisan interference and would undermine already weakened public confidence in our democratic processes — but, surely, the law is on the books for a reason and would need to be enforced in some circumstance short of a would-be caudillo driving a tank up to the Capitol building and opening fire.

The democratic case against such actions is that we ought to be able to trust the voters to decide for themselves.

I have been writing about politics for a long time, and the more voters I meet, the less confidence I have in them as a group. 

Democrats are having a good laugh at these convulsions on the right side of the political spectrum, and, to be fair, Republicans deserve to lie miserably in the bed they have made for themselves.

But while the Democrats may not have to think very much about whether the 14^th Amendment is a problem for their team, there is the uncomfortable matter of the 25^th Amendment.

If Joe Biden is reelected in November, he will be the oldest man ever elected to the office and will be 86 years old at the end of his second term. Even now, one need not be a gloating partisan to see that the president is not in top form, that he was a bit wobbly on the day he was sworn in and has gone downhill from there. 

As a purely actuarial matter, it is far from a remote possibility that Biden could suffer some debilitating episode before his second term is out, at which point Democrats will have to ask themselves: Is this the time to overrule the voters in the broader national interest?

One can imagine situations in which the president’s disability would be so obvious and so dramatic that the decision would be a relatively easy one.

But as anyone who has dealt with a declining elderly relative knows, sometimes it is a matter of good days and bad days, with the proportion of the latter to the former growing over time. It’s one thing to worry about that when it’s a retired granddad — it is another thing for a man with access to a navy and nuclear codes.

The voters know that Joe Biden is an old man in something less than full command of his faculties.

But, with all due respect to Rep. Dean Phillips, there is no apparent appetite for any Democratic primary opponent, and the movement to replace Biden for 2024 is limited at this time to a few doleful, off-the-record laments. 

Faced with another Biden-Trump showdown, the democratic spirit will advise: “Trust the people.” But the fact that we are headed for another Biden-Trump showdown is a pretty good example of why “trust the people” is advice that has to be taken with a few reservations.

This is a populist moment, and that populism has been effectuated by developments such as social media and the rise of small-dollar online fundraising, both of which have undermined the power of party leaders and other traditional institutional gatekeepers.

As it turns out, the gates need keeping, and even with such a sorry specimen as George Santos, it would be better to do the gatekeeping before the election rather than after we have heard from We the People, bless their hearts.