Who would believe that the man legislatively in charge of shaping the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on the planet is a dirt-bag political prostitute from New Jersey willing to sell his country's interests and his own honor for cash, cars, and Egyptian gold bars?

Well, for one, the U.S. Justice Department, whose indictment of Robert Menendez boldly proclaims:

Robert Menendez Allegedly Agreed to Use His Official Position to Benefit Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, Fred Daibes, and the Government of Egypt in Exchange for Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars of Bribes to Menendez and His Wife Nadine Menendez, Which Included Gold Bars, Cash, and a Luxury Convertible  

The man who, as a consequence of that indictment, just "temporarily" resigned his chairmanship of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee has been a U.S. senator for 17 years, and, for many of those years, he seems to have been patently taking brazen bribes to betray his oath of office and sell his honor — unless, that is, corruptly enriching himself by selling his senatorial power is part of "well and faithfully discharging the duties of the office" upon which the citizens of New Jersey have serially, and unwisely, "elected" him.  

Robert Menendez is one of a mere 100 men making law in the upper legislative house of the most important nation on Earth.  As such, he's one of the 100 most important men on Earth.  And yet he appears to be above the very laws he makes.  Until now, perhaps.

This isn't Menendez's first Justice Department rodeo.  Federal prosecutors indicted him way back in 2015 for taking $1 million or so worth of bribes from an apparently über-retinologist in Florida for which, as the Justice Department then boldly proclaimed:

Senator Robert Menendez and Saloman Melgen Indicted for Conspiracy, Bribery, and Honest Services Fraud

That indictment charged Menendez with, among other things, using his Senate power to help the Florida retinologist loot a federal agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which provides health care benefits to over 100 million needy Americans.  A subsequent jury deadlocked on the senator but convicted the retinologist on 67 criminal counts of Medicare fraud.  The retinologist went to federal prison for 17 years.  (Curiously, President Trump pardoned him.)  The senator went back to the Senate, where he sat for the next eight years, until now.

The senator's story, as his senatorial propaganda proclaims, is a "quintessential American" one:

[Bob Menendez] grew up the son of Cuban immigrants in a tenement building in Union City and has risen to become one of 100 United States Senators. He is currently the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 118th Congress. He has earned a national reputation for his international leadership in the Senate, which pairs with his long-time reputation as a fighter for New Jersey families who puts their health care, economic security and education ahead of powerful special interests.

Moreover:

the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee [is] ... one of the Senate's original ten standing committees that has shaped our nation's foreign policy to advance the interests of all Americans in war and peace. As Chairman, Bob has a unique position to help set policy for the way in which the U.S. government confronts key foreign policy issues of the day including competing with China, defeating the global pandemic and strengthening our alliances. Senator Menendez will also play an instrumental role in the effort to rebuild our nation's foreign policy institutions and restore our place as a leader around the globe in the post-Trump era. He also served as the Committee's Chairman in the 113th Congress, where he led the effort to sanction Russia after they invaded Ukraine.

Wow — old Bob's a one-man Senate wonder-boy wizard, without whom the nation (maybe even the world?) would be practically prostrate!

Is there no honor, no integrity, no principle, no accountability anywhere in the vast federal bureaucracy?

Let's hope the Menendez story isn't quite quintessentially American.  Being perhaps quintessentially senatorial may be more than enough.

The least our federal senatorial club could have done eight years ago, after Menendez's first merry-go-round with the Justice Department, was to have consigned him to perpetual senatorial purgatory.  It might now at least make him wear nothing in the Senate but tee shirts, gym shorts, and sneakers.  That's good enough for Senator Fetterman, whose only crime is perhaps incomprehensibility.  Instead, the Senate merely makes Menendez "temporarily" step down from his "powerful" committee's chairmanship.  Well, perhaps that's better than making him wear an electronic ankle bracelet.  Maybe that comes later?

Any government refusing to discipline an evident villain in the upper house of its legislature — the very legislature making the very laws governing that government itself — is collectively as villainous as the villain himself.  And a people whose government has no honor have, themselves, no honor.  We're starting — at every level of governance — to look like a failed state.  In representative republics, governments cannot fail unless the people they govern have themselves first failed.

Look, for example, at the one cardinal emblem that, above all others, most prominently depicts and displays our governing dishonor.

Our national debt (which, in arrears, finances our governing dishonor) is now $33 trillion.  And — even if we made zero new laws between now and 2053 — our national debt's projected to be $66 trillion a mere three decades from now.  That's an amount equal to over three quarters of the entire globe's present gross domestic product.  And we'd then be paying $5.4 trillion a year, in interest payments alone, on that national debt's unpaid principal.  That's an interest payment virtually as big as our entire present national budget.  So if we now prorogued our national Legislature (à la the Eleven Years Tyranny) for the next 30 years, we would, in 2053, be expending all federal revenues exclusively on nothing but interest payments on our national debt. 

Obviously, the United States of America never intends to repay its metastasizing national debt.  It can't.  All it can do is just keep rolling that debt over until no one anywhere in the world any longer wants to buy any more of it, and then default.

Are we not too, then, selling our national honor?  Is not reckless governance fecklessly creating — in the fruitless process of politically prostituting itself — a $66-trillion national debt it never intends to repay just as dishonorable as a senior senator selling himself for cash, cars, and Egyptian gold bars?

After all, who's ultimately more responsible for our metastasizing national debt than the upper house of our national Legislature, who's but the supreme senatorial representation of ourselves?  And if our supreme legislative representation tolerates in its midst a career kleptocrat villain like Menendez, is it not itself villainous?

Almost everywhere one looks these days, our national culture and its honor seem to be transforming into the lowest and most lawless common denominator of all the ill governed citizens of all the world's failed states now beating their paths to our broken borders.

And God help us, we have senior senatorial lawmakers like Robert Menendez guiding us through our coming time of trials and tribulations.

Image: Bob Menendez.  Credit: World Economic Forum via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.