Why GOP doesn’t want Menendez to quit | Will Bunch Newsletter

A flurry of new polls over the weekend showed Donald Trump is tied with, or perhaps leading, President Joe Biden with likely 2024 voters. Do you think voters are falling for Trump’s idea that outgoing Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley should be executed for treason, or his call for shutting down MSNBC because they criticize him, or something else? Why are we fighting over Sen. John Fetterman’s shorts when a would-be emperor wears no clothes?

📮 I received an Ophelia-sized flood of responses to last week’s question about the media interviewing politicians who lie frequently. Most of you have serious qualms about further sit-downs with Donald Trump. Ellen Irwin wrote: “They know he will lie and say whatever will stir up anger and fear among his base, often with violent and destructive results, yet they continue to amplify his [baloney].” But some of you agreed with me that The Donald needs a tough interlocutor. “Yes, continue to interview Trump,” wrote Daniel Hoffman, “but in the manner of a journalist, not a stenographer.”

This week’s question: One way or the other, it looks like Sen. Robert Menendez’s goose is cooked. Who should replace him as New Jersey’s next senator? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Even Wyatt Earp says that New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez needs to go. That’s the Ocean County, N.J., Democratic Party chairman (who did you think I was talking about?), who joined a posse of Garden State Democrats this weekend when he declared with a “heavy heart” that the state’s twice-indicted senior U.S. senator should step aside “to make room for a senator who will continue to stand up for Democratic values.”

Wyatt Earp was no lone gunman. As the shocking charges that the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took gold bars, wads of cash, and a Mercedes-Benz from businessmen tied to the regime in Egypt reverberated, key New Jersey Democrats including Gov. Phil Murphy and fellow Sen. Cory Booker also said that time was up for their ethically challenged colleague. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman not only told Menendez to quit, but mocked him on X/Twitter, much as he’d done with another New Jersey pol.

Sometimes, good government really is good politics. The crisis of Friday’s federal indictment of Menendez, his newish wife Nadine, and the three businessmen is also an opportunity for the star-crossed Democrats to prove to cynical voters that they are the political party with zero tolerance for corruption in its ranks. After all, in an era when liberals and conservatives argue about whether the Justice Department has been, or should be, “weaponized,” a top Democratic senator was just charged by a Democratic appointee in Attorney General Merrick Garland.

There are a few problems with that scenario. The biggest one, of course, is Menendez himself, who appeared before the media on Monday in his hometown of Union City and revealed a Trumpian level of delusion and egomania in vowing to stay in the Senate during his legal battle, and even run for reelection next year. The senator denied the bribery charges, and insisted that the $480,000 in cash found throughout his house, some stuffed into his jacket, was his savings, “which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”

He didn’t mention the gold bars.

While I was finishing this piece on Tuesday morning, there was a mini-avalanche of rank-and-file Senate Democrats in a seeming race to call out Menendez and demand that he resign immediately. But the ones who have the power to perhaps change the senator’s mind — such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or maybe President Biden — have given squishy answers or remained silent, squandering a chance to claim the high ground.

On the surface, though, the oddest thing about the latest Menendez caper is the relative silence of rival Republicans. This is a GOP, you’ll recall, that this week is launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden, despite zero evidence of any wrongdoing. But the response to Senator Gold Bars has been largely quiet. (House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did say Menendez should resign, but only when he was pressed by reporters during a gaggle.)

Some of that is probably realpolitik. Republicans know that their only real chance for stealing a Senate seat in blue New Jersey next fall is if the tainted Menendez somehow returns as the Democratic candidate. But the real problem for the so-called Party of Lincoln is that imposing a rigid ethical standard on the New Jersey senator would call attention to the raging fires of corruption that currently engulf its own house.

Even today’s shameless Republicans couldn’t endure the hypocrisy of calling for Menendez to resign after doing nothing to force out their own currently indicted member of Congress in New York Rep. George Santos, who bamboozled Long Island voters in 2022 with a false resume. Santos now faces charges that paint him as a con artist.

Even worse for the GOP is that talking about the mountain of evidence describing Menendez selling his office raises the question of why Justice Clarence Thomas is still on the Supreme Court, after a series of stunning reports from ProPublica and others about accepting luxury vacations and private jet travel from billionaires, some of whom clearly had an interest in matters before the High Court. The newest bombshell — that Thomas appeared at events that raised money for the billionaire Koch Brothers’ right-wing causes — begs the question of why impeachment hearings are taking place for Biden, but not for the worst case of corruption in Supreme Court history.

And then there’s the biggest elephant in the Republican room: Donald Trump, the party’s all-but-locked-in 2024 standard bearer, is currently facing 91 felony counts on matters that cut to the very core of American democracy, including his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The party that is screaming “let the justice system play out!” about its likely White House nominee has little choice but to apply the same standard to Menendez, even if the stench of a senator’s brazen corruption must linger over the U.S. Senate for the next 16 months.

Menendez’s continued presence in what once claimed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, sometimes as the deciding vote in a chamber that’s currently 51-49 Democratic, is making a powerful statement to voters that political corruption doesn’t matter anymore. It will encourage widespread cynicism and apathy about the American system, and thus make it easier for a dictator to weaponize the Justice Department, fire civil servants, or install coup-friendly generals.

The Menendez scandal is a chance for Democrats to tell voters that they are the party that won’t tolerate such blatant corruption in their ranks, and thus provide a clear contrast to a GOP blessing the unholy trinity of Santos, Thomas, and Trump. Schumer and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership need to march into Menendez’s office and tell him in no uncertain terms that his charade is over. It takes a lot more firepower than just Wyatt Earp.

Question: What is the point of [California Democratic Gov. Gavin] Newsom debating [Florida GOP Gov. Ron] DeSantis and how is it good for Biden who must have cleared it? — Via Jared Beloff (@Read_Instead) on X/Twitter

Answer: Good question, Jared. I think this strange political sideshow — scheduled to take place Nov. 30 on Fox News with Sean Hannity moderating — really speaks to the weakness of the current political moment. That’s because the two politicos who actually matter, Trump and Biden, are avoiding debates and limiting open-ended news conferences. Instead, we get two next-level governors known for their over-confidence — except that for Newsom that means an ill-advised trip to a French restaurant, while for DeSantis that means restricting the rights of LGBTQ or Black people. Unless you wake up every day in fear of “wokeness,” I think Newsom creams DeSantis on the issues — but will that hurt Biden, if folks wonder why he’s not the one out there? Stay tuned.

There are no accidents in politics. In the summer of 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign at a county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi — where racist locals notoriously murdered three civil rights workers in 1964 — and spoke of “states rights,” which had been political code for preserving segregation. Pundits say Reagan’s cynical ploy sealed the South’s switch to the GOP, but it wasn’t as cynical as this: On Monday, Donald Trump made a campaign stop at the armory that sold an AR-15 to a Florida white supremacist who painted a swastika on the barrel before he used the weapon to hunt and kill three Black people in a Dollar General store last month.

Trump’s campaign trip to South Carolina was highlighted by a surprise visit to Palmetto State Armory, a massive gun emporium, and now one of several in a chain co-owned by the brother of the state’s GOP attorney general. Much of the initial attention went to Trump’s flirtation in the store with a Glock semi-automatic and an erroneous report he’d purchased it, which would have been interesting given Trump’s 91 pending felony charges. Few noted that Palmetto State Armory had recently been in the news for selling the AR-15 to Ryan Palmeter, the 21-year-old who left a racist manifesto before his killing spree at the Dollar General in Jacksonville.

Some will stress that Palmeter purchased the weapon legally, and that his teenaged mental health problems would not have turned up on a background check. OK, but Palmetto State Armory has a long and undistinguished record of marketing weapons to right-wing extremists. The Trace reported in 2021 “that the company began selling products emblazoned with imagery associated with the “boogaloo” — which is slang for a war to topple the federal government.” It wrote that this lined up with other efforts to sell to the anti-government crowd, including an AR-15 inscribed with “You Lie” — what South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson famously shouted at Barack Obama in 2009. Now, it hardly seems a gaffe that a presidential frontrunner charged with leading an insurrection against the federal government would visit Palmetto State Armory. It’s a crude appeal to the dark soul of an armed and dangerous movement.

I started my Attytood blog in 2005, but for technical reasons way too boring to explain, The Daily News and Inquirer basically destroyed the first three years of posts. A few were salvaged, like this epic 2006 rant about the then-dean of Washington journalism, (the now late ... RIP) David Broder of the Washington Post. It was three years into George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s Iraq War, and I was mad when Broder lashed out at bloggers (like me)! “The night I became angry came in March 2003, the night that your friends and colleagues in the White House press room took a dive at a nationally televised press conference, and refused to challenge the president’s specious grounds for war,” I wrote. “I was furious over what my profession — the one where you had once inspired me a generation ago — had now become.” Righteous? Or self-righteous and over-the-top? You tell me after reading: “Why I’m mad: An open letter to David Broder from a fellow journalist.”