U.S. Senator Cory Booker has broken his silence on fellow Senator Bob Menendez’s indictment on federal corruption charges, releasing a statement this morning saying that Menendez should resign.
“Stepping down is not an admission of guilt but an acknowledgment that holding public office often demands tremendous sacrifices at great personal cost,” Booker said. “Senator Menendez has made these sacrifices in the past to serve. And in this case he must do so again. I believe stepping down is best for those Senator Menendez has spent his life serving.”
Booker added that Menendez still deserves his day in court, but that the charges against him are too major for him to continue his work in Congress.
“He, like anyone involved with our criminal justice system, deserves our presumption of innocence until proven guilty,” Booker said. “There is, however, another higher standard for public officials, one not of criminal law but of common ideals. As Senators, we operate in the public trust. That trust is essential to our ability to do our work and perform our duties for our constituents.”
Booker is the latest in a long line of New Jersey Democrats, among them Gov. Phil Murphy and a huge number of state elected officials and party leaders, to call for Menendez’s resignation.
He’s also the seventh member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation to issue the call; Reps. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson), Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Donald Norcross (D-Camden), and Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff) had already done so in previous days. Eight other Democratic U.S. senators (and counting) from outside New Jersey have said as well that Menendez should go.
Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) and Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark), meanwhile, both released statements expressing concerns over the charges against Menendez, but neither explicitly demanded his resignation. And Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), the senator’s son, has thus far defended his father.
Booker’s statement this morning stands in contrast to his reaction to Menendez’s previous criminal indictment in 2015, when Booker resolutely stood by his fellow senator and became one of his top surrogates throughout his trial. Menendez is “sort of like a superhero” and “one of the greatest advocates for justice on the planet Earth,” Booker said at the time.
That was the attitude that most New Jersey Democrats had after Menendez’s first indictment; those charges were eventually dropped after a mistrial, and Menendez won re-election in 2018. But the substantially more serious and lurid charges this time around have engendered a very different reaction, and Menendez is not expected to have party support should he run for a fourth term in 2024.
If historical precedent is any indication, Booker’s opinion may carry more weight than just about anyone else’s.
In 1980, after four-term Senator Harrison Williams was charged with taking bribes from an FBI agent posing as an Arab sheik in the Abscam scandal, the state’s other senator, Bill Bradley, stood by him and said that allegations made by the government aren’t always true. Bradley still refused to call for Williams’s resignation following his 1981 conviction.
In March 1982, ten months after Williams’s conviction, the United States Senate moved to debate whether Williams would become just the third U.S. Senator in history – and the first since the Civil War – to be expelled. Expulsion has been the recommendation of the Senate Ethics Committee and required a two-thirds vote. Still, Williams refused to go.
But on March 10, at the end of the fifth day of the Senate expulsion trial, Bradley announced that he would vote to expel Williams. The loss of Bradley tipped the scales; with a vote near and without the support to avoid being expelled, Williams, for the first time, hinted that resignation was an option. He resigned the following day.