Parties must vigilantly fight corruption
No political party is immune to corruption. Democrats and Republicans are both vulnerable to the temptations offered by positions of power. Healthy parties are, however, aware of the damage corruption does, not only to public policy but to their electoral status, and act to excise such excesses when exposed. Today we see signs on the national level that one party is, in this respect, healthy — and the other is not.
Last month, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. He is accused of, among other things, profiting from his position as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. It is the second time Menendez has been indicted — his first round ended with a hung jury in 2015 and a harsh rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee.
The outcry from fellow Democrats to this indictment has been loud and emphatic. At least half the party’s senatorial caucus — including Menendez’s homestate colleague Cory Booker — have called for his resignation, as has the state’s governor and much of New Jersey’s House delegation. Under caucus rules, Menendez has been removed as chairman of Foreign Relations.
Menendez is, as a legal matter, accorded the presumption of innocence. But a seat in the U.S. Senate is not such an entitlement. Menendez has established a disgraceful pattern, and his partisan colleagues are eager to cast him into political purgatory.
Contrast that with the continued Republican embrace of Donald Trump, once and would-be future president, currently not only the dominant figure in the pursuit of the presidential nomination but the subject of 91 felony counts.
Last week, a New York state judge issued a summary judgment in a civil suit against Trump and his businesses, declaring that Trump had habitually falsely inflated the value of his holdings to win more favorable terms on business deals and financing. There are other issues in the lawsuit yet to be settled, but the major question has been settled: Trump built his real estate empire on fraud.
A healthy political party would cast such a disgraced candidate aside. That the GOP has not done so signals how deeply the Trumpian virus has infected it. It merits electoral failure.