Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet
On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.
The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.
It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens was unsealed, found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.
