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 Robert 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 one-kilo 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 United States Senate. As chairman, 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 businessman 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 on Monday, Menendez insisted he’s staying in the Senate and offered a preposterous excuse for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that F.B.I. 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. (Ironically, his family now, indeed, faces government confiscation.) 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 mash-up of “Veep” and “The Sopranos.”
His refusal to resign is a problem for Democrats both substantively and politically. At the most basic level, it’s hard to see how, given what Menendez has been accused of, he can be trusted to do his job. His continued tenure in the Senate is an embarrassment to the institution and to the Democratic Party, an embarrassment that will only grow more acute as his prosecution proceeds. Republicans, of course, understand that his presence in the Senate works to their advantage, which is why the right-wing senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas declared that Menendez should stay put.