Hopefully, Democratic leaders in the Senate will do the right thing, and this column will be obsolete by the time you read it. I would have written it earlier, but I thought that at any moment, the dam would break and Bob Menendez, the recently indicted senator from New Jersey accused of spectacular acts of treachery and corruption, would be pushed out. Yet here we are, four days after the Department of Justice gave us all a look at Menendez’s cash-stuffed jacket and 1-kilogram gold bars, and a united front of condemnation has yet to materialize. As I write this, more than a dozen Democratic senators have called on him to step down. Every other Democratic senator — especially the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer — should join them.
It’s true, of course, that an indictment is not a conviction. (Menendez knows this as well as anyone, having been charged with corruption once before but spared by a hung jury.) While he is entitled to another fair trial, he is not entitled to a seat in the U.S. Senate. As chair, until recently, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he is accused not just of accepting lavish bribes but also, more seriously, of passing sensitive information to an Egyptian businessperson with ties to Egypt’s government. This is wrongdoing on a whole other level from what he was previously accused of.
At a defiant news conference Monday, Menendez insisted he’s staying in the Senate and offered a preposterous excuse for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that FBI agents found at his house. He said he kept it for emergencies, “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Apparently, Menendez, who was born in New York, wants us to believe that, because of intergenerational trauma, he feels the need to hedge against Communist revolution in America. He also claimed to be the victim of racist persecution by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator” — a deployment of identity politics so audaciously cynical, it belongs in a caustic TV farce, some deranged mashup of “Veep” and “The Sopranos.”
His refusal to resign is a problem for Democrats both substantively and politically.
If Menendez somehow fends off a primary challenger next year, he could offer Republicans the chance to pick up New Jersey’s ordinarily safely Democratic Senate seat.
“It’s astonishing, given that kind of evidence, to say you’re not going anywhere,” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said Monday evening, a few hours after Menendez’s news conference.
Fetterman was the first Democratic senator to call for Menendez’s resignation. He’s since been joined by several others, including Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and, most significantly, Menendez’s fellow New Jersey senator, Cory Booker.
But the Senate’s top Democratic leaders are so far standing behind him, with Schumer calling him a “dedicated public servant” who “is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey.” Perhaps Schumer and others are holding their fire so they can try to ease Menendez out behind the scenes, but given Menendez’s news conference, he seems unlikely to go anywhere without a shove.
For Fetterman, it was an easy call. “It’s just so clear,” he said. “Black and white.” One of his favorite movies, he said, is “Goodfellas,” and he recalled the scene in which Henry, undressing before a closet packed with clothes, pulls stacks of bills from his pants. “It’s literally just like that!” Fetterman said of Menendez.
He’s right. So how could there be any doubt that Menendez has to go?
The Senate, said Fetterman, “is a strange place sometimes.”
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.