George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds, stoked outrage by comparing himself to the great civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks.
“Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the back, and neither am I gonna sit in the back,” Santos told Mike Crispi Unafraid, a rightwing podcast.
Santos also said he will run for re-election in his New York seat, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens.
A prospective opponent, the Democratic former state senator Anna M Kaplan, said: “George Santos is an absolute disgrace who continues to embarrass New Yorkers.”
Now honoured by a statue in the US Capitol, Parks was a seamstress and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People secretary who carved her place in history when on a bus in Alabama in 1955 she refused to move to make way for a white passenger and was arrested and jailed.
According to the Architect of the Capitol, Parks “remained an icon of the civil rights movement to the end of her life. In 1999, the United States Congress honored her with a Congressional Gold Medal. Following her death on 24 October 2005, she was accorded the rare tribute of having her remains lie in honor in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in recognition of her contribution to advancing civil and human rights.”
The Parks statue is the first full-length representation of an African American person in the US Capitol. Made of bronze and granite, it is close to 9ft tall and, according to its official description, “suggests inner strength, dignity, resolve and determination, all characteristic of her long-time commitment to working for civil rights”.
Santos, 34, compared himself to Parks while sitting in what appeared to be a parked car, wearing a powder blue zip-up hoodie.
Since being elected last year, he has consistently attracted controversy over reports of behavior ranging from the bizarre to the picaresque and allegedly criminal. Charged in New York, his bail was guaranteed by relatives. No trial date has been set.
Republican House leaders, governing with a small majority, have not seriously moved against him. A motion to expel, and make Santos only the sixth House member ever ejected, failed after Republicans refused to back it.
Speaking to Crispi, a former Republican congressional candidate in New Jersey, Santos said of critics in his own party: “They come for me, I go right back for them … So, you know, it’s not gonna stay that way any more. I’m gonna call them out. You want to call me a liar? I’ll call you a sellout.”
In February, at Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Santos was confronted by Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee.
Romney called Santos a “sick puppy”. Among Santos’s many controversies is a dropped charge of theft in Pennsylvania in 2017, over a purchase of puppies.
Santos told Crispi: “The man goes to the State of the Union of the United States wearing the Ukraine lapel pin and tells me, a Latino gay man, that I shouldn’t sit in the front, that I should be in the back. Well, guess what, Rosa Parks but didn’t sit in the back and neither am I gonna sit in the back.
“That’s just the reality of our work. Mitt Romney lives in a very different world. And he needs to buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride for him.”
