What counts as 'corruption' under federal law has been whittled down for years. The New Jersey senator and his wife allegedly still fit the bill.
In hindsight, the Supreme Court decision seems a bit self-serving when you consider the ethical issues we’ve seen from its ranks.
It’s a trend that shows no signs of stopping, as the Supreme Court continues to whittle away at federal anticorruption laws. Earlier this year, the courtthat made it harder for prosecutors to bring corruption charges. In one case, the court essentially said it’s fine for a campaign worker to take $35,000 from a real estate developer, so long as you aren’t an actual government official.
The moral of the story up until now has been that so long as the stuff you get from people can be made to seem like wasted efforts on their part, feel free to cash in. Menendez allegedly made a crucial error: He’s accused of making good on the promises he’d made to the people who were paying him. And also, by hoarding enough evidence — in the form of nearly half a million in cash and Googling things like “how much is a kilo of gold worth” — he’s given prosecutors plenty to work with.
But Menendez’s stepping down would solve only a symptom and not the real problem. Congress needs to pass stronger laws to put new teeth back into our anticorruption statutes after years of the judiciary’s filing them down. Whether Menendez is still around and bold enough to vote against those measures when the time comes is an entirely different question.
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