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George Santos Must Be Expelled After House Ethics Committee Report Finds Substantial Evidence of Criminal and Ethical Misconduct
Stand Up America Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs Brett Edkins issued the following statement after the House Ethics Committee released its investigative report reviewing allegations against George Santos. The report found that Rep. Santos blatantly stole from his campaign, committed fraud, and knowingly filed false information with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
"George Santos built his political career on lies and deceit, so it comes as no surprise that the bipartisan ethics committee found he likely committed multiple crimes to obtain his seat in Congress. Even his Republican colleagues concluded his actions damage the reputation of the House of Representatives and warrant punishment. This report has one clear conclusion: Santos is wholly unfit to hold office.
"If George Santos had any shame or remorse over deceiving hard-working New Yorkers and his colleagues in Congress, he would resign immediately. Instead, he continues to use every possible lie and excuse to cling to power, leaving his constituents without real representation in Congress. Since he refuses to step down, House Republicans should grow a backbone and expel him from the House of Representatives.”
Stand Up America is a progressive advocacy organization with over two million community members across the country. Focused on grassroots advocacy to strengthen our democracy and oppose Trump's corrupt agenda, Stand Up America has driven over 600,000 phone calls to Congress and mobilized tens of thousands of protestors across the country.
LATEST NEWS
Miles and Miles of Protest in Bolivia as Miners and Unions March Against Privatization and Low Wages
Peasants' unions and other groups are protesting a law that they say would allow corporate control of small farmers' land, as well as fuel shortages and a low minimum wage.
May 14, 2026
An economic crisis and the repeal of a crucial gas subsidy, fuel shortages, and a law that opponents say will allow the encroachment of corporate interests on Indigenous and peasant lands are among the central concerns of thousands of miners and other workers who have joined a march from Bolivia's northern Amazon territories to La Paz, with a major miners union in the capital joining the protest on Wednesday.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives of La Paz and an influential peasant union met land workers and Indigenous representatives this week as they arrived in the capital after having marched 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) "for over 20 days from the tropics into freezing high-altitude terrain, many wearing nothing more substantial on their feet than plastic sandals," as Olivia Arigho-Stiles reported at Jacobin.
At least 50 marchers required medical treatment last week for exhaustion, dehydration, and other ailments, but the unions are showing no sign of ending the general strike that was begun by Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), with the mass mobilization also including at least 70 road blockades around the country, according to the Bolivia Highway Association.
TeleSUR reported that the entry of the miners union signified "a substantial increase in pressure" on right-wing President Rodrigo Paz, whose resignation some workers' organizations are calling for.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives joined the ongoing marches and protests after Paz failed to attend a scheduled dialogue. Miners have been alarmed by the scarcity of fuel, "a dire shortage of essential explosive material, and significant delays in the liberation of new areas designated for mining exploitation," reported TeleSUR.
The broader protests began in response to stagnant, low wages as well as Law 1720, which the government has claimed will benefit small-scale farmers by allowing them to obtain mortgages after converting their smallholdings into "medium-size" businesses.
But Roger Adan Chambi, an Aymara lawyer and specialist in Indigenous land law, told Jacobin that the measure was passed "without consulting the sectors it was supposed to benefit (peasants and small producers), jeopardizing legal security and constitutional guarantees regarding land ownership."
“Far from being an opportunity for small producers to access credit, this law weakens the property rights of peasants and Indigenous communities, especially those resisting on the agricultural frontier,” Chambi said. “Structural insecurity and the lack of basic services will, in the future, force them to mortgage or sell their plots, facilitating dispossession and the transfer of land to corporations.”
Oscar Cardoza, a peasant union leader and a representative of the marchers, declared at a public gathering in La Paz this week: “Our life is collective, not individual. The land must be respected; it’s not for sale.”
Al Jazeera reported that the end of a fuel subsidy, which was cut after Paz took office last year during what he called an "economic, financial, energy, and social emergency," also pushed COB to issue the call for a general strike.
The subsidy had been crucial for working Bolivians, and the cut has made quality fuel increasingly inaccessible.
"Starting today, a general, indefinite, and active strike is declared, until the government understands the people’s demands,” COB secretary-general Mario Argollo told a group of 1,000 supporters on May 1.
The union is also calling for a 20% increase to the nation’s minimum wage, which currently sits at 3,300 bolivianos ($477.71) per month.
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'Unlawful, Deeply Destabilizing, and Catastrophic': Dems Warn Trump Against Cuba Attack
Dozens of House Democrats wrote that the US "must not respond to a crisis it is creating with policies that deepen suffering."
May 14, 2026
A group of more than 30 Democratic lawmakers in the US House is imploring the Trump administration to abandon any plans for a military assault on Cuba and end the decades-old blockade that has deprived the island nation of fuel and sparked a grave humanitarian crisis.
In a letter dated May 12 and addressed to top Trump administration officials, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and other House Democrats wrote that the US "must not respond to a crisis it is creating with policies that deepen suffering, undermine the rule of law, and repeat the gravest failures of its past."
The members of Congress demanded that the Trump administration immediately end its use of the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison for migrant detention, lift all "coercive economic measures" currently strangling Cuba, and "abandon reported plans for US military action against Cuba."
"Such action," the lawmakers warned, "would be unlawful, deeply destabilizing, and catastrophic for the Cuban population, while further increasing displacement, exacerbating mass suffering, and undermining US interests in the region."
"It must be unequivocally rejected," they added.
Through sanctions and unlawful threats of military action, the Trump administration is deepening the humanitarian crisis in Cuba. At the same time, they are once again threatening to use the Guantanamo Base, a prison with a history of dehumanizing and abusing people, to detain… pic.twitter.com/cXbCFfds4W
— Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (@repdeliaramirez) May 13, 2026
The House Democrats' letter was released shortly before Cuba's energy minister said the country has "absolutely no fuel" and "absolutely no diesel," blaming the oil blockade that the Trump administration imposed earlier this year after kidnapping the president of Venezuela—previously Cuba's primary supplier of oil.
"This dramatic worsening has a single cause: the genocidal energy blockade to which the United States subjects our country, threatening irrational tariffs against any nation that supplies us with fuel," Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote Wednesday on social media. "What the spokespeople of the U.S. regime try to portray to the world as the direct consequence of poor management by the Cuban government is, in reality, the result of a perverse plan aimed at driving the people’s shortages and hardships to extreme levels."
US President Donald Trump has said publicly that his next military target is Cuba, which he has threatened to "take" by force.
Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba's foreign affairs minister, posted the House Democrats' letter to social media on Thursday, writing that "the government that claims to defend democracy should listen to the majority voices that oppose the current escalation of threats, aggressions, tightening of the blockade, and energy siege against our country."
Last month, nearly every Republican senator and one Democrat—Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania—voted down a legislative effort to prevent Trump from launching an attack on Cuba without congressional authorization.
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Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for 'Stealing Their Voices'
"They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
May 14, 2026
In yet another display of how Illinois' pioneering biometric privacy law can be used to protect Americans, state residents who work as audio storytellers, broadcast journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and more filed class-action lawsuits against Big Tech this week for "stealing their voices" to develop artificial intelligence products.
Since Illinois legislators passed the groundbreaking Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in 2008—regulating the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage, retention, and destruction of biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of a retina, iris, hand, or face geometry—there have been thousands of lawsuits filed and major settlements with Clearview AI, Facebook, and Six Flags.
Represented by the award-winning civil rights firm Loevy + Loevy, the Illinoisans are suing Adobe, Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Apple, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung under BIPA.
The plaintiffs are audiobook narrators Lindsay Dorcus and Victoria Nassif as well as journalists Robin Amer, Yohance Lacour, Carol Marin, and Phil Rogers. Journalist Alison Flowers is part of all lawsuits except those against Amazon and Apple. Their lawyers noted that "between them, they have multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, several Pulitzer Prizes, several Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, an Edward R. Murrow award, a James Beard award, a SOVAS award, and many, many other honors."
Their cases focus on the voiceprint of each plaintiff, which is "a digital fingerprint of the human voice," as the complaints explain. "It is a mathematical capture of the acoustic features—pitch, timbre, resonance—that emerge from a person's distinctive physiology, combined with the speech patterns that person develops over a lifetime: accent, cadence, articulation. Like a fingerprint, a voiceprint identifies the individual. Like a fingerprint, it cannot be changed."
The Adobe case targets Firefly, the company's family of generative AI models. The complaint states that the company "treated the human voices that built Firefly as ownerless—ignoring the speakers' rights, taking their voiceprints without asking, paying them nothing, and giving them no notice that their voices were being used at all, and "built a mirage of commercial safety around products whose construction violated the one thing Illinois law requires before collecting a voiceprint: consent from the person."
The Google filing points out that the company "has been a repeat defendant in BIPA cases" and even "paid approximately $100
million to settle BIPA claims arising from Google Photos' face grouping feature," among other high-profile settlements.
The Meta suit highlights that "no defendant in any biometric-privacy matter pending in the United States has had more direct, more sustained, or more financially consequential notice of BIPA than Meta," given that the company "has paid the three largest biometric-privacy settlements in American history," including $650 million to resolve claims under the Illinois law regarding Facebook's photo tag suggestions.
"By the time Meta released Voicebox in June 2023, MMS in May 2023, and SeamlessM4T in August 2023, Meta had been a BIPA defendant for nearly a decade and had paid more than $2 billion in biometric-privacy settlements," the complaint continues. "The technology Meta built using plaintiffs' voices now competes with plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living."
The Amazon filing details similar harm to plaintiffs:
Amazon extracted plaintiffs' voiceprints without notice or consent, depriving them of the right BIPA guarantees to make an informed decision about the collection and use of their biometric data. Amazon retains those voiceprints in its commercial models and continues to profit from them. Amazon has further disseminated those voiceprints, encoded in model parameters, through its cross-affiliate, subprocessor, and integration-partner networks. The technology built on those voiceprints now displaces plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living—the broadcast journalism, investigative podcast, audiobook narration, voiceover, and voice performance markets that the voice products are designed and sold to serve.
"What we are seeing is an illegal and unethical exploitation of talent on a massive scale, and one of the largest violations of biometric privacy ever committed," said Loevy + Loevy attorney Ross Kimbarovsky in a Thursday statement.
"The legislators who wrote and passed BIPA had the foresight to realize that biometric privacy was going to be a major civil rights issue in the 21st century," the attorney continued. "Social security numbers can be changed, passwords can be reset, and credit cards can be canceled, but once your biometric data is compromised, there's nothing you can do about it."
"These companies know the law, know their liability, and know exactly how to build consent systems that comply with BIPA," Kimbarovsky added. "They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it."
In addition to Illinois, Texas and Washington state have enacted biometric privacy laws, while California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia have comprehensive consumer protection policies that apply to such information, according to Bloomberg Law. However, efforts in Congress to enact federal legislation—such as the National Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act—have been unsuccessful.
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