Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., resigned from the Senate after significant pressure from Democrats to do so following a guilty verdict in his federal corruption case.
The New Jersey Democrat was found guilty on all 16 counts, which included charges of extortion, bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, wire fraud, and acting as a foreign agent. The trial lasted nine weeks and the jury deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., immediately called for Menendez’s resignation, despite initially holding off from doing so after the charges were announced.
“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” he said in a statement.
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Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., echoed Schumer’s call in his own statement, along with nearly every other Senate Democrat.
Menendez has expressed his intention to appeal the conviction.
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The New Jersey senator has served in the chamber since 2006 and was re-elected twice. Before being a senator, Menendez served for several terms in the House of Representatives.
In 2015, Menendez was indicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery, and honest services fraud in relation to gifts from a wealthy ophthalmologist who the government alleged he was doing political favors for in return. However, a mistrial was declared in 2017 when jurors could not agree on a verdict. By 2018, prosecutors said they would not seek to retry the senator.
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If Menendez did not take the recent advice of Democrats to resign following the verdict, some had threatened the route of expulsion from the Senate. But that would require a two-thirds majority vote in the chamber, which can be difficult to achieve among lawmakers.
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Expulsion is also a rarely used mechanism and no lawmaker has been cast out of the chamber since the 1800s. There was an effort to expel former Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., in 1995, but he ultimately resigned to avoid that fate.
Only 15 senators have ever been expelled. Fourteen of those expulsions were due to support for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In other cases, efforts to expel senators, in many instances for corruption, have ended due to the lawmaker leaving office. On some occasions, expulsion proceedings were also dropped.
