The expulsion of George Santos was another win for Congress’ grammatical hero: Jamie Raskin

When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to kick out George Santos, it wasn’t just voting on morals or crimes.

Some, like Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, were voting on grammar. That’s why, out of the monthslong ordeal that resulted in Santos’ expulsion, Raskin is the true American hero.

This time, Raskin, along with 310 of his colleagues, voted to expel Santos. But it was after the previous expulsion vote took place in November when Raskin proved his grammatical bona fides.

In that vote, Raskin voted not to kick Santos out because, despite the evidence, Raskin worried about the precedent it would set. After that vote, Santos sent a letter laden with grammatical and spelling mistakes to Raskin and the others who had sided with him. Raskin — in a delightful bit of trolling — copyedited and returned the letter to Santos.

In a Congress that’s on track to be the least productive of any American Congress since 1931, it was a rare moment of something — anything — happening.

“I appreciate your note and only wish someone had proofread it first,” Raskin scrawled on Santos’ letter, which screwed up principles vs. principals, left out a couple of words from one sentence, and used the wrong words in another sentence. Raskin caught all the errors and added, “Meantime, you should apologize to the people of New York for all of your lies and deceit. I know you must have thought you could get away with it all in the party of Trump, but the truth is resilient. P.S. It’s not shameful to resign.”

And you thought your English teacher’s markups were bad.

It’s not the first time Raskin — who, as former editor of the Harvard Law Review, knows about editing others’ work — has been a grammatical hero in Congress this year.

In February, Raskin excoriated his colleague Lauren Boebert for repeatedly using the word Democrat as an adjective, not a noun: “I just wanted to educate our distinguished colleagues that Democrat is the noun. When you use it as an adjective, you say ‘the Democratic member’ or ‘the Democratic solution’ or ‘the Democratic plan,’” he said on the House floor. “It seems like it’s an act of incivility, as if every time we mentioned the other party, it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment, like, ‘Oh, the Banana Republican Party.’”

Credit Raskin for pushing back against Boebert’s very old grammatical trick. Raskin is correct; no reputable dictionary lists Democrat as an adjective.

If you think the difference between Democrat, used as an adjective, and Democratic is insignificant, why have language experts spent decades noting its ability to rankle? Across the 20th century, Republicans — depending on how petty they were feeling — went back and forth between using Democrat Party vs. Democratic Party in their platform and writings. In each documented debate, some liked that Democrat Party sounded so off-putting, but equivocated on whether that part of speech switcheroo was worth making. It was an ongoing battle between “Let’s deliberately make them sound worse” vs. “Call them what they want to be called.”

But by the turn of the century, Democrat-as-adjective basically became part of the GOP platform. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post observed in 2006, “The derisive use of ‘Democrat’ in this way was a Bush staple during the recent campaign.”

And Donald Trump, ever a fan of saying the quiet part out loud, said in 2018, “The Democratic Party sounds too good so I don’t want to use that, OK?” He added, “I call it the Democrat Party. It sounds better rhetorically.”

We can be thankful that Congress has members like Raskin who use grammar for good, not silly squabbling. As long as this Congress can’t bother to pass laws, at least they’re learning something useful.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world. Send comments, questions, and distributive adjectives to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.