For a long stretch in our politics, shamelessness has been a superpower. Elected officials who are willing to withstand widespread derision and embarrassment have demonstrated they can remain in office, ignore calls for their resignation, and sometimes even win reelection.

And for a while, it looked like former New York Republican congressman George Santos would be the most vivid and outrageous example yet of the power of shamelessness. Two votes to expel him from the U.S. House of Representatives fell short of the two-thirds threshold; some House Republicans concluded it wasn’t right to expel a member who had been indicted but not convicted, and who had not yet had his day in court. (It would indeed be embarrassing and wrong for a chamber of Congress to expel a member who was then acquitted and exonerated.)

But Santos’ defense mostly consisted of complaining that everyone else was biased against him; he never offered much of a substantive public defense to the 23 criminal counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, falsifying records, money laundering, aggravated identity theft, theft of public funds, lying to the Federal Elections Commission, and lying to the House. Nor did Santos ever have much of an explanation for why his campaign manager, Nancy Marks, pled guilty to conspiring with Santos to make false statements, obstruct the FEC, and commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Santos never had an explanation when Ohio Republican congressman Max Miller told CNN, “Mr. Santos’ [campaign] took not only my credit card, personally, he took my mother’s credit card, personally, and he swiped them both for an additional $5,000, marking it as an ‘over-donation.’ …He defrauded more than 350 people for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (When you steal from your colleague’s mother, you’re just begging to get thrown out of the institution.)

To believe Santos, you would have to believe vast swaths of Democrats and Republicans just got together to make all kinds of false allegations against him and manufactured enough evidence to persuade the FEC and a grand jury. Santos will indeed have his day in court, just not as a currently-serving congressman. In the end, 311 House members – 105 Republicans and 206 Democrats – rejected Santos’ implausible defense and deemed him too much of an embarrassment to remain as a member.

But perhaps the most interesting reaction to Santos’ expulsion came from the other side of Capitol Hill, where Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman – rapidly becoming one of the most unpredictable and intriguing members of the Senate – argued that Santos’ removal was a good first step that should be followed by the expulsion of senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Menendez is accused of running years-long bribery scheme and faces charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The Department of Justice also alleges Menendez “provided sensitive, non-public U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and otherwise took steps to secretly aid the Government of Egypt.”

Thirty-one Democratic senators have issued statements saying Menendez should resign. But Menendez made clear he will never resign, both in a public press conference and in a closed-door meeting with fellow Senate Democrats. He insists he has nothing wrong and hand-waved away spectacularly odd details like gold bars and having $500,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and a safe. He insists the indictment is, “an active smear campaign.” (Back when I covered the infamous Democratic senator Robert Torricelli for the Bergen Record, there was a grim joke that in New Jersey, the real opposition party to Democrats wasn’t Republicans; it was the FBI.)

And since the initial kerfuffle, almost everyone on Capitol Hill seemed to shrug and move on with business as usual. Menendez is accused of effectively functioning as an Egyptian spy, and yet somehow, he’s still on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! (Menendez did step down as chairman of the panel, and skipped one classified briefing on Israel in mid-October.)

The circumstances with Menendez are similar to those of Virginia governor Ralph Northam a few years ago. Northam initially admitted he was in 1984 yearbook photo showing one figure in blackface and another in a KKK hood, then he said he couldn’t remember which figure he was, then implausibly claimed that his memory had improved, was now “vivid,” and he was certain he wasn’t in the photo. Northam’s excuses never added up, and almost every major political figure in the state and others called for Northam’s resignation, but he just brazened it out and finished his term. A lot of Virginia Democrats were appalled by Northam, but they weren’t actually willing to take any action to remove him.

A slim majority of Democratic senators want Menendez to go, but they don’t want to break a sweat trying to get rid of him. Only Fetterman is willing to bring up the issue of Menendez’s scandal, over and over again, and call for his expulsion. There are Republicans who don’t talk about Menendez’s scandal as frequently as Fetterman does.

On The View last week, Fetterman argued Menendez “actually did more sinister and serious kinds of things” than Santos did, pointing to the alleged work for the Egyptian government. Let’s be generous and say it’s roughly a tie. If Santos is worth kicking out, why should Menendez stick around?

Democrats will argue that former president Donald Trump is the champion of brazening it out; Trump insists his impeachments were triumphs because except for Mitt Romney, no Senate Republican was willing to convict him and remove him from office. But Trump is out of office; keeping him out of office will be a decision for Republican primary voters and the electorate.

Whether Menendez remains in the Senate is ultimately up to his colleagues. Calling for his resignation is a declaration he doesn’t belong in the chamber. The question is, will senators have the nerve to not just issue toothless statements and actually do something about the New Jersey’s shamelessness, the way the House stood up to Santos?