Menendez: U.S. can’t move forward with Trump-controlled GOP

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-North Bergen) isn’t sure there’s any room left for moderates in the Republican Party.

The senator lamented the party’s rightward shift during and after President Donald Trump’s lone term in office.

“The nation cannot move forward with a Republican party that is absolutely controlled by Trump, not because of him as the person but because of what he believes in,” Menendez said Wednesday. “When you cannot get Republican members to get an independent commission to investigate the insurrection of Jan. 6, which they lived through and which their comments immediately after called for such an effort.”

A bill to establish an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters died Friday after facing overwhelming opposition from Republicans.

The final vote tally was 54-35, with just six Republicans joining Democrats in backing the commission, which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) initially backed but then opposed. That’s six votes shy of the 60 needed to pass legislation in the upper chamber.

“They lost the presidency, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, so I don’t understand why playing that gameplan even politically makes sense,” Menendez said. “But above all, the nation can’t move forward, especially when we have such a closely divided Senate and a closely divided Congress.”

Though Trump has been out of office for months, a recent poll commissioned by the Democratic Governors Association found overwhelming support for him among Garden State Republicans.

More than eight-in-ten, 85%, New Jersey Republicans told Public Policy Polling surveyors they had a positive view of the former president, and 81% said they were likely to back primary candidates who embraced Trump’s agenda.

Roughly 70% of Republicans polled wrongly believed the attack on Congress was a false flag operation organized by Trump’s opponents, that President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election and that the pandemic was exaggerated by Democrats seeking to harm Trump politically.

The numbers, and congressional Republicans’ intransigence on Trump has Menendez pining for the GOP of years ago.

“I yearn for the days — not that I agreed with everything that they stood for — but a Republican Party that was fiscally conservative and socially moderate,” he said. “Right now, that appears to be somewhat out of touch, but I hope that it can be restored and we look forward to that day because then there are things we can come to common ground on.”