When will Republicans stop shooting themselves in the foot?

Let me scream from a rooftop that I warned righteous Republican House members not to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.). I knew all their virtue-signaling would come back to bite them, as it did on February 13 when Biden Democrat Thomas R. Suozzi clobbered Republican nominee Mazi Pilip in a by-election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District by almost eight points.

It’s not as if the ill-fated Republican nominee did a bad job soliciting votes. She was predictably outspent by the local Democrats, who were awash in Hollywood and high-tech money. Pilip epitomized the Republicans' attempt to showcase their own identity candidates. She ran in a district filled with Jewish and black voters as an Ethiopian Jew who had been an Israeli paratrooper and was married to a Ukrainian Jewish physician.

It might be best for Republicans to stop flaunting their moral purity with ruinous consequences.

The Republicans thought they had covered every base with Mazi, and she tirelessly hit the issues that supposedly mattered most to voters in her district, namely illegal immigration and the war with Hamas.

The Republican candidate lost badly to a Democratic opponent who denounced her as a right-wing extremist while hiding his past support for Biden’s policies, including, until recently, the Democratic position on porous borders. If 105 Republican members of Congress had not voted to kick out Santos, even before the congressman was found guilty in a court of law for alleged criminal offenses, he would still be a voting Republican member of the House.

One can only imagine the pleasure Democrats experienced as they observed Republicans running to expel one of their own for morally inappropriate behavior. I couldn’t even begin to imagine that the Democrats would ever act this way. Although they may weaponize the Justice Department against their political opponents and push weirdo notions like banning the public recognition of two distinct genders while funding transgender operations for preteens, Democrats do show the virtue of standing by their own.

Congressional Democrats can bed Chinese spies, trip fire alarms in the Capitol on a whim, or continue to claim mendaciously that they have evidence that Donald Trump is working for Vladimir Putin, and nothing unpleasant will befall them. Democrats went on the warpath when Republicans voted to censure Black Lives Matter favorite Jamaal Bowman for his felonious fire alarm stunt, just before a congressional vote he opposed was supposed to take place.

For Democrats and their media lapdogs, it was supposedly a racist act even to suggest that Bowman, a Hamas-friendly BLM supporter, had behaved improperly by physically endangering his colleagues. Nor has any attempt been made by Bowman’s party to kick out U.S. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. Clearly it doesn’t matter much to his party colleagues that Menendez and his wife are facing charges up to their ears for taking foreign gifts and engaging in massive money laundering. Democrats coddle their politicians, while Republicans cannibalize theirs in the name of virtue-signaling.

I still can’t get out of my mind how the Democrats also stood faithfully behind Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) when he repeatedly lied about holding damning evidence that Trump and his staff were Russian assets. Unlike the disgraced Santos, Schiff is now on his way to becoming the next U.S. senator from California, amply supplied with cartloads of money from Democratic donors.

Worse, Republicans still haven’t figured out how to win outside safe red areas. They’re not very good at flipping purplish districts, as we saw last week. The more resourceful Democrats easily outspend their opponents and seem to have a much better ground game, even without cheating, which they’ll happily do if necessary.

The Republicans in any case need to come up with new strategies and lots of advertising money to flip the government in November. And they’ll need to find some way to minimize the Democrats’ use of loose voting practices, a situation that allows for cheating big-time.

In the meantime, however, it might be best for Republicans to stop flaunting their moral purity with ruinous consequences.

Last week the other side took home a big prize thanks to Republican House members. The Democrats were able to slim down the House Republican majority to the point where it is almost unworkable. Santos was a gift horse that his fellow Republicans should have treasured. He managed, to his credit, to sneak into his office while the previous officeholder, Suozzi, was fruitlessly pursuing the governorship.

Republican moral posturing, it should be understood, is not a victimless crime. Almost half the country — that is, the decent, patriotic half — will suffer if Congress is placed in the hands of the Democrats. The victorious left will do everything in its power to complete the work of turning our once admirable constitutional state into a woke one-party regime.

Whatever his personal failings, Santos was one of the barriers resisting that project. Now this sacrifice to moral purity has been replaced by a reliable Biden and Schumer ally. One wonders whether conservative journalists and Republican politicians who demanded Santos’ removal even care about the harm they’ve wrought.