The thing about corruption is that it spreads.
Like cancer.
Along the way, it eats away at everything it touches. Along the way, it prompts people to act in ways they never thought possible.
Consider the way Republican U.S. senators are reacting to the news that U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, faces serious bribery charges.
Several of them — Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Marco Rubio of Florida and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, among them — have said that Menendez should not have to resign his seat in the U.S. Senate, even though senators from Menendez’s own party and leaders from his own state are calling for him to do so.
The Republican senators’ reasoning is curious.
Most businesses would distance themselves from or even cut ties with someone who has been charged with something as serious as Menendez has. Those businesses would see it as a question of maintaining their enterprise’s reputation.
These Republican senators, though, see it differently. They argue that holding onto a position of great political power is a right.
Menendez, they contend, is entitled to remain part of what has been called the world’s greatest deliberative body until a court bailiff and prison guards haul him away to a cell.
Given that these same senators have sat silent while their GOP colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives have begun impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden even though no one yet has produced evidence that the president has done anything meriting impeachment, this is odd.
What makes these senators act so strangely?
Well, this is where it gets interesting.
Their arguments really are not about Bob Menendez, who has demonstrated ethical blindness for years. In just about any other time and in just about any other circumstance, his Republican colleagues in the Senate would have been happy — no, thrilled — to make him the poster boy for political malfeasance.
But these are not normal times.
These are the years in which Donald Trump rose to political prominence.
And many — no, most — Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted to retain Trump in the presidency after he’d fomented an insurrection to overturn the results of an election that his own administration oversaw.
They have continued to condone, excuse and support Trump even as charge after charge has piled up and as courts have determined that the former president committed rape and defrauded the public. They have abided Trump’s nonsensical charges that the entire legal system — including judges he himself appointed — has been “weaponized” against him.
And they have ignored or downplayed the seriousness of the charges filed against the former president in states both red and blue. They have accommodated themselves to the notion that it is okay for a former president to take classified documents — some dealing with the most sensitive issues of national security — and house them insecurely, then refuse repeated entreaties and demands from government officials that they be returned.
This is where corruption becomes the most corrosive.
Corruption such as this doesn’t confine itself to the person who tries to take things — classified documents, an election, a woman’s body — that don’t belong to him. No, it demands that others, such as Tuberville, Rubio, Cotton and their cohorts, become accustomed to looking the other way when such transgressions occur.
Corruption on this scale requires others to treat such behavior as if it were normal.
As if it were okay.
Then, having made all those demands, such corruption always commands that those who have yielded their moral integrity yield still more.
Eight years ago, men such as Tommy Tuberville, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton likely could not have imagined championing a man who betrayed the oath he took to defend the Constitution and treated the safety of our nation as a party favor.
But that was then.
This is now.
Now, they defend Bob Menendez — who has credibly been accused of taking $500,000 in bribes — because setting the precedent that breaking the law disqualifies one from holding public office might anger Donald Trump.
Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.
Once one has decided that fraud, insurrection and rape are acceptable, bribery isn’t that much of a leap.
That’s the thing about corruption.
It always wants more.
It always demands more.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students, where this commentary originally appeared. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
