Senate Democrats missed chances to avoid a pair of 2023 political headaches

“We’re going to Jersey?”

Michael Corleone had played it mostly cool on the drive to the famous sit-down massacre scene in The Godfather. However, his mask slips briefly when the car threatens to head south to New York’s neighboring state, New Jersey.

BIDEN HAS YET TO JOIN DEMOCRATIC CALLS FOR SEN. MENENDEZ OF NEW JERSEY TO RESIGN

Many national Democrats are surely feeling that same irritation looking at their 2024 prospects in the Garden State today. What political handicappers would have considered a sure thing is now up in the air, and Democrats will have to spend national money holding a must-hold seat. That is if Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) wins renomination, as he faces a 2024 Senate Democratic primary challenge in New Jersey from Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who represents the outer Philadelphia suburbs 3rd Congressional District.

Democratic concerns over having to spend time and resources in New Jersey next year rose when Menendez, the state’s senior senator in Congress, was indicted, along with his wife, Nadine Arslanian, in late September.

“Between 2018 and 2022, Senator Menendez and his wife engaged in a corrupt relationship with Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, and Fred Daibes — three New Jersey businessmen who collectively paid hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes, including cash, gold, a Mercedes Benz, and other things of value — in exchange for Senator Menendez agreeing to use his power and influence to protect and enrich those businessmen and to benefit the Government of Egypt,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams charged in a statement.

Menendez was in the position to allegedly benefit Egypt’s government because he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This isn’t the first time Menendez has faced prosecution. A previous corruption trial resulted in a hung jury.

In April 2018, the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” Menendez for violating “Senate Rules, federal law, and applicable standards of conduct” for accepting many gifts and trips from Salomon Melgen, an eye doctor who was convicted of $73 million in Medicare fraud, and acting as his agent. (President Donald Trump commuted Melgen’s 17-year sentence in 2021 with his final raft of pardons and commutations.)

Despite the trial and the senatorial tongue-lashing, however, most Democrats did not stand in Menendez’s way when he ran for reelection in 2018 and won with 54% of the vote. Now whoever the candidate is who runs for Menendez’s seat — and Menendez is moving ahead with reelection — could face a more hostile electorate. The state’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, narrowly won reelection in 2021 with only 51.2% of the vote, and longtime Democratic state Senate President Steve Sweeney lost reelection to a Republican truck driver who spent $2,300.

Also in 2018, Democrats faced a different dilemma with the reelection campaign of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The California senator was in her mid-80s and had held the seat since 1992. When she didn’t step down, the state party did not endorse her but offered only token opposition. She won reelection with 54% of the vote, a shockingly low showing by a Democrat in a statewide California election.

Feinstein had been the mayor of San Francisco and a lion of Golden State politics, a trailblazer in women’s politics in the state. She also moved a lot of legislation, from an assault-style weapons ban in the 1990s to fuel economy standards of the early 2000s to the introduction of breast cancer research-funding postage stamps.

Yet Feinstein’s final years in office were not, by most observations, happy ones. Feinstein picked a fight in 2017 with now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, then a federal appeals court nominee, by saying she couldn’t support her because “the dogma lives loudly within you,” drawing charges of anti-Catholic bigotry.

Then when Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court, at the end of confirmation hearings, Feinstein hugged Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying, “This has been one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.” The episode enraged many Democrats and renewed calls for Feinstein to resign.

The senator in recent years developed memory problems, which were widely reported on and distracted from the Senate Democratic policy agenda, particularly after the party won the majority in a pair of January 2021 Georgia special elections.

Feinstein fell in August, was hospitalized, and died on Sept. 29. She was 90.

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National Democrats chose to back both candidates, and it seemed to pay off in 2018. Feinstein and Menendez secured their seats for at least a majority of their next terms.

And there was nothing Senate Democrats could have done to force either senator from seeking reelection. But they could have tried. As many a pol has come to lament, reelection does not magically make your problems disappear.