The ‘Law and Order’ Party Gives Menendez a Pass
If their criminally convicted presidential nominee can’t be condemned, then neither can a corrupt senator of the opposite party.
TIME AND AGAIN ON TUESDAY NIGHT, speakers at the GOP convention condemned a rising tide of crime in Joe Biden’s America, notwithstanding the fact that the tide is actually going out rather than coming in. Between speeches, clips on the big screens portrayed devastating imagined scenes such as a barn exploding and families cowering in fear. (First they came for the barns, and I did not speak out, because I am not a barn. . .)
“Republicans are the law-and-order team,” House Speaker Mike Johnson declared during his speech Tuesday night.
That statement doesn’t really jive with Republicans’ attitudes toward Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions, which they’ve all decried as the byproduct of political prosecution and a criminal justice system gone nuts. You know the deal.
But what about crimes committed by Democrats? Insert Robert Menendez, who on Tuesday afternoon became the latest crook to face the book. A jury found New Jersey’s senior senator guilty of 16 counts of corruption and bribery.1
Most Democrats have called on him to resign, doing so either when the charges were first announced or on Tuesday when the verdict was handed down. Republicans are another story, though. Carrying through Monday’s theme of unity, they have joined hands to say that no, corruption charges are not disqualifying, and it’s best for Menendez to make his own decision about his political future. (He remains incredibly defiant.)
I caught up with a handful of senators on the floor of the Republican convention and asked them point blank whether they think Menendez should resign. Here’s what they said:
Rick Scott, Florida
It’s a decision he gets to make and, so, it’ll be a decision he gets to make.
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
I’m gonna leave that to my colleagues on the Democratic side. I mean, the conviction is serious. The fact that I think it was all 16 charges, that’s very serious. But I’m staying out of that. That’s something the Democrats have already opined on—I think several have called for his resignation. I’ll let the Democrats solve their Democrat member problem, not me.
One senior Republican senator specifically requested to talk on condition of anonymity to relay more candid thoughts about the situation. Asked if elected officeholders have a moral obligation to demand a corrupt colleague relinquish his seat, the senator told me, “I’m torn on that,” citing past cases in which lawmakers were convicted of crimes but later exonerated:
Senator [Ted Stevens] did not resign when he was convicted, and it turns out then that he lost his election, and in the end he was exonerated and completely cleared as being innocent of his crimes. So I think he should probably look at the precedents of things that have happened.
I don’t know how many times this has happened, but it seems to me he should look at the precedent, and the precedent of Stevens would say, you know, he’s got a right to stay in office. But it’s never a happy day when any member of the Congress is convicted. On the other hand, he oughta resign.
The example here of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is interesting, but I’m not sure it’s entirely relevant. In 2009, then–Attorney General Eric Holder had Stevens’s corruption conviction from the year before voided after an FBI whistleblower revealed gross misconduct in the prosecution, including withholding important evidence from the defense. For both Menendez and Trump, there’s no sign of anything like that, yet.
Overall, the prevailing stance among Senate Republicans—that Menendez can decide on his own whether his guilt disqualifies him from holding one of 100 Senate seats—amounts to a refusal of any responsibility to render a collective moral judgment. This might not be the healthiest path for the world’s greatest deliberative body.
And simply pointing to the Stevens example runs the risk of implying that because there’s literally always a nonzero chance that a conviction will later be overturned—for any number of reasons, no matter how technical or even extremely unlikely—criminal convictions are simply irrelevant to a politician’s fitness for office. Why should Menendez take any accountability or show any remorse if that’s true?
The decision about whether he will stay in office might not remain his, though. If enough Democrats move to expel Menendez—an effort his fellow New Jersey senator, Cory Booker, has indicated he will lead—there might be enough votes to remove him from Congress. Just don’t expect members of the party of law and order to carry the weight.
That’s just my Babydog
Along with the rest of the GOP field of Senate candidates, West Virginia Governor Jim Justice delivered a speech Tuesday night that carried the same themes as the rest of the main speakers.
But Justice stood out in one major way: He brought his large English bulldog, Babydog, to sit in an armchair next to the lectern.
I watched this spectacle from The Bulwark’s desk up in the nosebleeds of the arena, and it was amusing to see a veritable sea of photographers and camera crews fixate on an ensconced dog. Afterward, Justice wheeled Babydog around the floor in a yellow wagon. It was a hit.
If you didn’t listen to Justice’s inflammatory speech—“The bottom line . . . is one thing: We become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November,” he said—and just stared at Babydog instead, it was kind of nice, a reprieve from an otherwise grim evening. Thank God for dogs.
I cannot make sense of Menendez’s motive for this level of corruption apart from a pure, unadulterated love for the game. As a longtime senator and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he could have easily made seven figures just by leaving Congress and peddling access on K Street. At the very least, he could have remained a senator and engaged in more modest sorts of corruption, such as the questionable trading practices that have made so many of his colleagues rich beyond measure. But he opted for gold bars and envelopes of cash instead.
“The bottom line . . . is one thing: We become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November." I suppose this was intended as a threat but why do the words sound like the ravings of a spoiled, entitled child?
LIke most of the Republican Party, who at first clearly understood the danger Trump posed to the country, and said so, then toadied up in order to gain a breath of power regardless of the consequences they obviously saw, none of them, as my mother would have said, have leg to stand on when it comes to any sort claim to a moral center. They have the moral compasses of a weather vane, and they are happy to take the rest of us with them.
The Founders hoped for ‘a republic of virtue’. If they could see these folks, they would seriously wonder if the whole business of creating a nation had been worth the trouble.