Bob Menendez sentence doesn’t fit the crime

If New Jersey voters didn't want corruption, why would they vote Democratic?

Now that Bob Menendez is safely housed in the hoosegow, let me make this observation:

I can’t really see the point of these draconian federal sentences

If the voters in Hudson County don’t mind their legislators getting rich off government service, why should the rest of us care?

It’s not as though this is the first time a Hudson pol got caught doing this kind of thing and was re-elected anyway.

So how does this equal an 11-year sentence in federal prison?

Bob is 71 years old, so that is in effect a “life and death sentence,” as his lawyer remarked as he surrendered.

But if the voters didn’t want their U.S. Senator taking money on the side, then why did they vote Democratic?

It’s not as if they weren’t aware of what Bobby was up to during his long career in public service.

Or should I make that “public self-service?” From the beginning of that career Menendez had a role model for this sort of behavior.

That was the late Union City Mayor Bill Musto.

Musto got the same sort of kickbacks as Menendez did.

And he had a similar result when he went before the voters.

In Musto’s case, the judge set the date of sentencing on the same day as Election Day.

The headlines one day read “Musto gets seven years,” one local pol recalls.

The headline the next day was “Musto sweeps to re-election.”

In the case of Menendez, he faced trial in 2015 on charges that he did favors for a wealthy Florida eye doctor in return for trips on the doctor’s private jet to a villa in the Dominican Republic.

I sat through most of that trial. It ended in a hung jury, but I naively thought all those revelations about the favors Menendez took from Dr. Salomon Melgen would lead the Democrats to replace him when he went up for re-election in 2018.

Nope. The Democrats nominated him again to run against the squeaky-clean ex-Marine Bob Hugin.

New Jersey voters must figure that anyone who can’t get rich in office is simply too dumb to represent them. They re-elected Bobby in a near-landslide.

In any other state, a man like Menendez would have resigned in disgrace years ago. But after Bob made short work of Hugin, he went back to business as usual in Washington.

New Jersey Democrats simply like corrupt politicians.

That’s the only way to explain Bob’s election victories.

But nothing can explain why he went back to collecting tips, especially those gold bars and that Mercedes that his wife Nadine acquired.

Again I must say I find the sentence a bit too harsh. Knowing Bob as I do after three decades of covering him, I would argue that dangling such goodies before a Hudson County politician like Bob is a bit like dangling a steak in front of a hungry dog.

You’ll never train the dog to pass up that steak. If you don’t want him to lunge for it, don’t hold it out there.

It seems cruel to lock that dog away because he simply followed his instincts.

Steak is an apt metaphor. Menendez is known as a steady customer at Morton’s Steakhouse in D.C., where dinner for two starts at $294 – tip not included.

Senators make a mere $175,000 a year and those dinner bills pile up fast. There are various ways to get other people to pay them, and some are even legal.

You and I might frown on that sort of thing, but Morton’s is packed with people who think it’s perfectly fine.

Among those people is Donald Trump.

Forget about a mere Mercedes sedan; Trump is trying to get a Boeing 787 as a gift from Qatar.

Perhaps that’s the reason that Menendez has been openly begging Trump to intervene in his case.

In one of his final tweets before the prison door slammed behind him, Menendez pointed out why Trump should support him against the charges brought by the Southern District of New York:

“The SDNY prosecutors effort to uphold the conviction, in the appeals court, is an effort to reduce Constitutional immunity for government actors. These are precisely the same laws relating to presidential immunity that came up in DJT's case. This is a threat to Presidential immunity.”

Trump already commuted the sentence of Bobby’s eye-doctor friend with the jet and the villa.

Is Menendez next?

All I can say is: The voters of Hudson County deserve nothing less.