As a Chicago man, I have a special feel for hilariously depraved corruption. (Our “[X] Terms Since the Governor Went to Prison” safety counter is all the way up to three now in Illinois, but for a while there, we kept on having to reset the clock back to zero.) That’s why, as a guy whose state is probably going to send its former house speaker to jail as well — and where the most common reaction to that is mere surprise it took this long — I’ve never had anyone satisfactorily explain to me how or why New Jersey still manages to beat us in a head-to-head competition of political degeneracy. The Garden State is a concentrated locus of enduring American shame, a place where political scandal just seems to pool like runoff sewage from the Hudson and seep into every aspect of public life with the groundwater. It’s like God himself hexed the acreage between Philadelphia and New York City and designated it an informal tenth circle of hell, reserved primarily for crooked politicians and also (tellingly) Bon Jovi.

Former governor Chris Christie — with his thuggish “time for some traffic problems” bridge-closure scandal — actually sits at the ethical head of the class, a paragon of virtue compared with such soiled luminaries as Senator Bob “Torch” Torricelli, who famously cried during his 2002 resignation speech over how unforgiving people were acting about what, after all, only amounted to some light graft. Jon Corzine was caught sleeping with a married union boss he was negotiating across the table from as governor, and he was so hated by voters that he actually lost to Christie. (He consoled himself on his loss by immediately destroying multinational brokerage firm MF Global in 2011 to the cost of $1.6 billion and earning a lifetime ban from trading on futures markets.) Governor Jim McGreevey’s 2004 resignation speech — weird how many of these there are, huh? — made headlines for his revelation, delivered with his wife standing by his side, that he was “a gay American.” But it soon emerged that this was a distraction from the fact that he’d also put his boy toy (a svelte Israeli foreign national) on the New Jersey government payroll as well.

Therefore, it is with a happy heart that I inform readers of National Review that Robert Menendez is in trouble — again. The rodent-faced New Jersey senator, who sits atop the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, has been charged alongside his wife by the United States government with a series of counts that range from old-school bribery and graft of the sort you see only in sweaty B&W movies written by blacklisted Communists during the Fifties to what, if proven, amounts to something akin to “light treason.” A trio of Jersey businessmen introduced to Menendez by his new wife ended up paying him millions for a whole series of direct and wildly corrupt personal favors. Financial concessions, sensitive intelligence information, vote-buying, influence-peddling, you name it: According to the allegations, Bob Menendez was running a greasy little black-market shop in Washington, D.C., and the wares he was selling were the powers and influence of his office.

And what’s amazing is that this isn’t even the first time Menendez has been indicted by the Feds for grievous political corruption. (Think for a moment about how remarkable it is that this sentence is true and can be written about both Robert Menendez and Donald Trump.) What makes this story legendary even in New Jersey-sleazebag history, legendary even by the standards the state is forever lowering for itself, is that he narrowly survived being convicted in the Salomon Melgen affair back in 2015: He scored a mistrial on a hung jury, and the Feds eventually dropped the case in 2018, just in time for him to be reelected to the Senate during a Democratic-wave year. Other politicians might have exhaled in relief, thought “There but for the grace of God go I,” and walked the line from that point on. Menendez, instead, apparently just got straight on back to crimin’. In fact, it might end up being something more than sheer coincidence that Nadine Arslanian — unemployed and facing home foreclosure before she met, quickly courted, and married Bob Menendez around the time his first bribery case was dropped — was the conduit for Menendez to meet the three men whose bribes he is accused of taking.

But who cares about any of that? Let’s drop the high dudgeon and serious analysis for a moment and just be honest with one another: Every detail about this scandal rocks. Which bit was your favorite? Was it the fact that one of the guys was bribing Menendez in order to corner the Egyptian market on halal beef imports? (This is the Trading Places sequel that Hollywood is too unimaginative to craft.) Was it when the raid on Menendez’s property turned up tens of thousands of dollars of loose cash, much of it stashed inside business suits that had his own name stitched onto them as convenient labels? (“ATTN: This suspiciously large stack of non-consecutive unmarked bills of U.S. currency is property, Senator Robert J. Menendez.”) Or was it the fact that Menendez chose at times to be paid in gold ingots, like a pirate? The only thing that would have made the corruption more cinematically sleazy is if Menendez had demanded payment in Apartheid-era Krugerrands or blood diamonds, and now I am disappointed he did not.

This weekend brought yet another wonderful twist to the tale. You might think that people would be reluctant to go to the rhetorical barricades to defend a man literally caught with stacks of cash stuffed inside his suitpockets, but Jennifer Rubin, Alexander Vindman, and a bot-like army of gray Democratic partisans were out there in force this weekend to prove that they, like Menendez, can be bought for any price, embarrassing themselves with a messaging campaign that sought to take the heat off Menendez in such a cackhanded way that it backfired on themselves instead. “Here’s the deal,” Rubin wrote, adding value by clearing her throat: “Menendez resigns. Clarence Thomas resigns. One standard. Corruption is corruption.”

Leaving aside the fact that the rhetorical impact of the proposal was somewhat diminished by the fact that it had so obviously been farmed out behind the scenes on some private list as “the message to use today,” I also have to laugh at how pathetic the attempt is: These people seem to think this is a negotiation of some sort. I listen to these desperate fools make grasping comparisons between Clarence Thomas — an honest jurist accused of nothing other than having unpopular friends — and Bob Menendez, a man who is the closest human approximation in politics to a slime mold. I hear them aver that they’ll allow Menendez to be replaced by a progressive Democrat if Republicans allow Clarence Thomas to also be replaced with a progressive Democrat. And all I can do is laugh heartily and channel Caddyshack’s Judge Elihu P. Smails: “You’ll get nothing, and like it.” Not only is my offer nothing, I would furthermore appreciate Senator Menendez not resigning at all — let him remain in office for 2024, to force that humiliating decision upon New Jersey Democrats instead.