The George Santos fiasco is finally at an end, at least in Congress, with the U.S. House of Representatives – including 105 of his Republican colleagues – voting Friday to expel him. The 311-114 vote comfortably cleared the two-thirds majority needed to make him only the third House member to be expelled since the Civil War.

Santos himself was mostly a harmless amusement. But he was an embarrassment for his party and for the chamber, and it’s good that he’s gone. House Republicans deserve credit for producing the votes to remove him even though the party might lose his seat in an upcoming special election to replace him – a seat they badly need given their narrow majority. That was probably on the minds of the 112 Republicans, including leadership, who voted against his expulsion.

So, Santos is gone but there are some lessons we can take from the episode.

First, it demonstrates that political parties should invest more resources in vetting their candidates – especially in races they really don’t expect to win. Santos was one in a long line of House members elected in party landslides who turned out to radically unsuited for the job – and to the scrutiny that comes with public office. Santos was quickly exposed as a fabulist who had invented a phony life story, as well as a fraudster. He is facing a 13-count federal indictments, including charges of wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds and lying on federal disclosure forms. He wasn’t part of a national landslide, but he was part of a localized Republican wave, mainly in just New York and Florida during the 2022 election, so the same idea applies. Veteran Congress watchers will remember such disasters as California Democrat Katie Hill, who was elected in a 2018 Democratic landslide and resigned in 2019 after a sex scandal, or Utah Republican Enid Greene, who was elected in the 1994 Republican landslide and spent her brief time in the House mired in a campaign finance scandal.

The parties sometimes do a fair amount of vetting candidates before House primaries but it’s not done systematically. It generally depends on a competitive primary bringing out stories about the candidates, or the party network knowing whether a candidate is who he or she claims to be, or press reports. But there are huge holes that miscreants can exploit. Formal party organizations rarely have the capacity for serious vetting at the state and local levels, but both formal organizations and informal party networks could make it a higher priority to look into the backgrounds of those who offer themselves as candidates – and national parties could support those efforts. Too often, the parties are just happy to have a warm body on the ballot. They should realize that the downside of nominating a Santos is worth trying harder to avoid.

Second, it’s in the self-interest of individual members of Congress, the parties, and Congress as a whole to have a functioning ethics process. During the House debate on Thursday, Santos and his supporters made much of this being the first time that the House would expel someone who hadn’t been convicted of a crime. However, the ethics process has helped force out plenty of members, including Speakers Jim Wright in 1989 and Newt Gingrich in 1998, who were accused of wrongdoing and resigned. Waiting for the courts to act, as the Senate is doing now with indicted New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, leaves the institution unable to act for months or even years. In the meantime, the party and the institution risk their reputations. But parties certainly don’t want to act against someone based on accusations alone, either. A working, credible bipartisan (or nonpartisan) ethics process gives members an easy out while the process is underway, and then a relatively clear signal once an outcome is reached.

Lastly, the leaders of the push to expel Santos were the other Republicans from contested districts in New York, who were clearly doing it for electoral reasons. They didn’t want to share the ballot with him next November. That’s actually a healthy development. It demonstrates that at least some Republicans can still feel shame in this era of an indicted and disgraced Donald Trump seemingly cruising to another presidential nomination, and even more importantly that Republican politicians think that their constituents care about such things.

A lot of what works or doesn’t work in a representative democracy depends on politicians caring about elections and believing that voters will punish them and their political party for wrongdoing. If those politicians come to believe that polarized electorates will simply vote their party no matter what, then the incentives to actually represent voters disappear.

Granted, Santos is about as easy a case as we’re likely to see. But given where the Republican Party is right now, it’s good news that in at least some circumstances they don’t want to be associated with a liar and grifter. And it’s always good when politicians and political parties respond to healthy electoral incentives.

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