Menendez’ petty sleaze amid real thing

Democrat politicians have long been adept at making subtle, nuanced distinctions — in contrast to their clueless, blockhead partners in crime, er, partners in politics, Republicans.

It was the New York Democrat boss, Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett, who in 1905 explained the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.

An example of the latter is when a politician filches cash right out of the public till, said Plunkett. But this, he added, must not be confused with honest graft — for example, making a killing on a land deal linked to legislation you pushed through yourself.

That’s merely seeing your opportunities and taking ‘em, he famously expounded.

The pursuit of self-interest in public office — sleaze, you might say — has something of a distinguished American heritage.

George Washington Plunkett’s namesake, the first President of the country, invested heavily in western land and then pushed policies to get the land away from Indians and opened to settlers.

Now the question of the day is this: If there’s honest graft, is there also honest sleaze?

Upon the scene comes one Sen. Roberto Menendez, D-NJ, who is at great pains in federal court to add new, subtle, nuanced distinctions to our understanding of the art of governance.

There is indeed honest sleaze, says he, paraphrasing Plunkett.

The U.S. Justice Dept. alleges — in a case filed during the Obama presidency — that Menendez accepted pricey rewards including but not limited to big gobs of campaign cash from a Palm Beach, Fla., ophthalmologist, one Dr. Salomon Melgen.

In return, says the indictment, the senator in his official capacity did favors for his benefactor, such as trying to get the feds off his case in a massive Medicare fraud. (In a separate trial, Melgen already has been convicted of fleecing the bankruptcy-bound Medicare program out of tens of millions of dollars.)

The Menendez defense is that the senator was not Melgen’s bought-and-paid-for senatorial catamite, as the government alleges, but merely his dear amigo. The relationship was, yes, maybe just a tad sleazy. But it was not in strict contravention of federal bribery statutes, asserts the Menendez defense.

Meanwhile, the senator — son of Cuban immigrants, as he never lets you forget — goes on issuing press releases announcing this grant or that and offering his input on the weighty issues of the day. As if the on-going hubbub is a quibble over a parking ticket.

Menendez rose to the political forefront in the 1980s as a government witness who helped dispatch his mentor, New Jersey Sen. Billy Musto, wily and colorful Hudson County institution, to the hoosegow.

Now here Roberto is in the dock himself. And all because — some believe — as chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, he mouthed off against President Obama’s naïve foreign policy initiatives.

Menendez made retaliation — if that’s indeed what his indictment was about — seem tempting and easy, given his relationship with the flashy and egregiously indiscreet eye doctor.

The Menendez prosecution revisits an old legal conundrum. When is a bribe a bribe? And when is it, say, a gesture of friendship to be regarded with a wrinkled nose, maybe, but not outright disapprobation of the law?

Some years ago, the justices of the N.J. Supreme Court, huddling like oracles inspecting bird entrails, pored over statutory language and legal precedents regarding bribery. The justices espied a bad omen.

The heavens might come crashing down, they reasoned, if justice allowed bribery to be vaguely defined and promiscuously alleged.

So the court issued an edict that bribery, properly defined, requires rigorous, exacting proof of an explicit quid-pro-quo arrangement. Proof, in other words, a prosecutor is highly unlikely ever to get his little mitts on.

More recently and more relevant to the Menendez federal prosecution, the U.S. Supreme Court arrived at a similar conclusion in a case involving “gifts” to a politician, the then governor of Virginia. Ah, a glimmer of legal hope for Roberto.

So what might seem like a slam-dunk case against Menendez involves powerful interests and high-falutin’ constitutional concepts, both of which discourage a rush to rash judgementalism.

The Menendez case nudges up against the weighty old question: When do political contributions leave off being expressions of First Amendment-protected free speech? And when do they start becoming efforts of malign influence, efforts to subvert representative government?

Special interests do, after all, have legitimate concerns to look after. The threat of inept or plain dumb regulatory and taxing measures looms ever present. But then again, corporations do exist as self-interested entities, structured to pursue profits and evade individual accountability.

The Democratic Party doesn’t want fastidious lines drawn around the question of money in politics any more than the Republican Party does. Precisely as the man said, money is the very mother’s milk of politics.

Nor does any corporate colossus or banking behemoth wish to have its voice muted by Goody Two-Shoe reforms that restrain them from rolling out the money artillery.

In the big-picture context, the bribes (or gifts) lavished on Menendez fade into a background of transactions of far more vast pecuniary magnitude.

Even Menendez’ stay in a fourstar Paris hotel with his eye-doc buddy picking up the tab fails to stack up against, say, the phenomenal $153 million in “speech fees” (wink, wink) that Bill and Hillary Clinton took from corporate influence seekers, including such toobig-to-fail financial institutions as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Powerful business interests, richer than Croesus, have their party consorts. George Soros and Tom Steyer dole out millions to their consort Democratic Party. Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Bros. shell out millions to their consort Republican Party.

Meanwhile, labor unions keep the Democratic Party as their court eunuch. (Or is it the other way around?) In either event, six of the top 10 all-time biggest political contributors are unions. And since 1990 they have lavished an astounding $798 million of workers’ dues dollars on the party.

This may seem only consistent with the party’s claim to be the tribune of the lowly working schlub. But consider the frequency with which unions find themselves at odds with the law and under scrutiny by organized crime and other investigative agencies.

And consider labor’s increasing dependence on ever-expanding unionized public employee bureaucracies for dues revenue. Can the impressive sums of SEIU, AFSCME and NEA money pumped into Democrat coffers be confidently classified as strictly efforts to improve the lot of the toiling proletariat?

The two parties increasingly make themselves available as the consorts of the same big business interests. Data from Center for Responsive Politics:

•Democrats take $29.5 million from Goldman Sachs, Republicans take $28.5 million.

•Republicans take $29.6 million from the National Association of Realtors, Democrats take $27.2 million.

•Democrats get $23.3 million from Microsoft, Republicans get $17.8 million.

•Republicans get $21.1 million from GE, Democrats $15.3 million.

•Democrats take $23.8 million from Comcast, Republicans take $14.8 million.

•Republicans take $19.9 million from Citibank, Democrats $18.6.

And so it goes. True to the stereotype, Republicans come off as slightly more the majordomo attending fussily to corporate needs.

But Democrats are increasingly horning in on the GOP’s role as errand-runner for the transnational corporate empires, unsentimental empires that salute only the flag of the bottom line, not the Stars ‘n’ Stripes.

The $41.2 million Republicans got from Bank of America and J.P.Morgan Chase & Co. is somewhat more than the $34 million Democrats got from them. But do such numbers really delineate any meaningful distinction between the two parties and the influences they respond to?

The two parties’ sugar daddies, while they have their differences right and left, have their areas of consensus regarding what counts most to them — namely, economic self-interest.

Take the Democrats’ hard-core lefty billionaire George Soros and the Republicans’ right-wing libertarian billionaire Koch Bros.

Commanding fabulous sums of wealth, Soros and the Koches naturally favor trade deals that serve free-wheeling global corporate agendas over what they view as parochial American agendas.

And both naturally favor unregulated, open- borders immigration that floods the labor market with low-skilled job seekers and holds down wage levels.

As for Menendez, in the big picture his sleaze is barely a brush stroke on the canvas.

His best bet may be to find a way to impart to the jury the alltoo-true cliché that what’s really shocking when it comes to money and politics is not what’s against the law but what isn’t.

Dave Neese grew up on a Midwest farm, received a degree in Slavic Studies (Russian lit), Indiana U., did stints in the U.S. Army and in various news and other jobs from New Hampshire to California. At The Trentonian he covered the Statehouse and was editorial page editor.