Chuck Schumer is doing a lot of damage in failing to demand that Bob Menendez resign | Opinion

Democratic Senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Chuck Schumer of New York started out in Washington together 30 years ago, in January of 1993, after being elected to Congress from neighboring states the previous November.

Though politicians do have personal loyalties, I can’t imagine it’s sentiment that’s kept the majority leader from calling on Menendez to resign in the five days, though it feels far longer, since he was indicted on bribery charges last Friday.

But then, I can’t think of any other reason that makes much sense, either, especially since Schumer’s statement praising Menendez as a “dedicated public servant” is so damaging to his party.

Either serially indicted politicians with a long history of ethics problems should hold office or they should not. And no matter what happens to either Bob Menendez or Donald Trump in court, neither man is fit to serve.

According to the Menendez indictment, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accepted gold bars and envelopes of cash in return for the aid he helped secure for the authoritarian government of Egypt, where human rights are virtually nonexistent. He also is accused of trying to intervene on behalf of a couple of New Jersey businessmen from whom he allegedly took bribes.

On Wednesday, Schumer told reporters, “We all know that senators — for senators, there’s a much much higher standard. And clearly, when you read the indictment, Sen. Menendez fell way, way below that standard.”

Do we all know that? Then why not call for his keys right now? And how please tell us are we holding Menendez to a higher standard by expecting the foreign relations chair to refrain from seeking aid for the foreign government that’s lining his pockets?

About those gold bars in the closet

Like Trump, Menendez is pleading not guilty, which is his right. But the senator’s suggestion that he stowed gold bars in his closet because his parents were born in Cuba, where the government seized assets after Castro came to power, tells us that he also shares Trump’s belief that the gullibility of the American public can never be overestimated.

A majority of Senate Democrats, along with the Democratic governor of New Jersey, have already called on Menendez to step down. But even if Schumer is instead working behind the scenes to move him out, how does that change the perception of a double standard?

In my first job in Washington, which was covering the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut congressional delegations for the New York Times starting in January of 1995, I met both Schumer and Menendez several times, though I knew neither very well.

My main memory of Schumer is that he was and remains the only person who ever made me cry in an interview, by asking whether I had kids, and then when I said no, noting that that was a shame since children are what make life worth living.

He seemed not to notice my reaction, though other women told me they had a similar one when he told them the same thing. Hopefully, he has long since retired that line, and will soon see to it that Menendez retires, too.

The NYT archives show that I quoted Menendez only once, on the day that Bill Clinton was impeached. Hillary Clinton had gone to Capitol Hill to “rally the troops.” In a closed-door meeting with Democratic House members, she said Republicans were ‘‘hounding him out of office” for purely political reasons. Resignation was out of the question, she told them, and was answered with six standing ovations and a bunch of hugs.

‘’She said this is as much about ending his agenda on health care and other things as about hounding him out of office,’‘ Menendez told me after the meeting. ‘‘She said there would be no resignation and we should not and cannot allow them to hound him out of office.’‘

If any of the House Democrats I interviewed that day weren’t sure about that, they didn’t let on. But I thought both that of course Clinton’s impeachment was political and that he should resign anyway. Not only for lying under oath, but for a relationship that many more people now than then see as so unequal as to have been an abuse of power.

At the time, even most feminists disagreed, and offered Clinton unqualified support.

Still ‘defining deviancy down’

Lindsey Graham made this argument on the House floor: “Don’t put your legal and political interests ahead of the rule of law and common decency. If you find that these are high crimes, that is the burden you’re placing on the next office holder. If they can’t meet that burden, this country has a serious problem. I don’t want my country to be the country of great equivocators and compartmentalizers for the next century.”

Neither did I, and one of us hasn’t changed her mind.

Graham and so many others have, though. Which is why, all these years later, as the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I also covered in the ‘90s, put it, we are still “defining deviancy down.”

When Bill O’Reilly correctly called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a killer” in 2017, Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

Trump’s whole vice-signaling, idealism-killing career argues that since all pols, and all people, do the wrong thing sometimes, well then we’re naturally all just out for ourselves, and there’s no such thing as behavior that’s truly disqualifying.

There is, though. Menendez should pack his bags because he’s disgraced the office. And unless there’s no longer any such thing as disgrace, that will be true no matter what Schumer or a jury decides.