A New Jersey state senator is on trial for accepting bribes in exchange for political favors, a federal judge has declared the way the state’s primary election was run to be fundamentally unfair, and New Jersey’s attorney general on Monday filed fraud charges against one of the state’s most formidable Democratic strongmen.
Known for explosive political prosecutions such as Abscam, Bridgegate and Bid Rig, the state has lived up to its reputation for scandals over the past year, leading six in 10 New Jersey residents to believe that politicians in New Jersey are somewhat or very corrupt.
“In New Jersey politics, there are more good surprises than bad,” said Amol Sinha, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
But there are signs that the recent political turmoil may bring a history-changing silver lining — a tipping point that leads to change.
“It’s like a slow-motion video of an object falling,” said Andrew Zwicker, a physicist at Princeton University’s Plasma Institute and a state senator. “You see it’s falling, but you don’t know where it’s going to end up.”
“But the object will never be in the same place,” he added.
There is still a long way to go before the state, which has no shortage of corruption war stories, reaches a new equilibrium.
Former Gov. Chris Christie’s run to the White House was derailed by a bizarre, brazen scandal in which he closed access lanes on the George Washington Bridge in political retaliation against an unfriendly mayor. Former Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned after admitting to an affair with an aide he’d hired as a security guard without a background check. And the last U.S. senator to be convicted of corruption and sent to prison, Harrison Williams, was busted by federal authorities in the bribery scandal known as Abscam, the subject of the movie “American Hustle.”
In 2009, a massive corruption investigation that became known as the Bid Rigging probe led to the indictment of 44 people in New Jersey, including three mayors, two state assemblymen, and five rabbis. The investigation was so big that the former news site Gawker ran a headline that read, “Everyone in New Jersey Got Arrested Today.”
Since 1980, five Atlantic City mayors have faced criminal indictments for extortion, bribery, child abuse and theft, including stealing $87,000 from a youth basketball organization.
In Newark, all three mayors who governed the city from 1962 to 2006 were indicted on criminal charges.
There are structural hurdles to rooting out corruption in a state with a dense population, high taxes, a budget of about $55 billion and 21 county governments.
“New Jersey politics is very transactional, and there’s always something someone needs,” said Loretta Weinberg, a retired state senator.
“The political environment is dominated by men in non-government business — real estate brokers, lawyers, developers — and government is a vehicle for bolstering their interests and private business,” she said. “And after a while, it starts to feel like that’s how New Jersey politics works.”
The campaign of Rep. Andy Kim, who is running for Sen. Robert Menendez’s seat, takes direct aim at that premise.
Kim, 41, ran this month on a platform of “restoring integrity” to New Jersey politics and won the Democratic nomination with 75% of the vote. He will face Curtis Bashaw, a Republican from Cape May, New Jersey, in November.
On Monday, after Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin outlined the charges against strongman George E. Norcross III, Mr. Kim urged voters not to be overwhelmed by news of yet another significant indictment and fall into apathy.
“There’s no doubt that New Jersey politics is experiencing great turmoil, but I believe we can come out of this situation better,” he wrote on social media. “When you read about scandals and corruption, don’t disengage. Let’s move forward.”
To secure the nomination, Mr. Kim tapped Tammy Murphy, wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, to stand in for the very broken politics that nurtured Mr. Menendez.
He also filed a lawsuit to overturn a fundamental source of power for party leaders in New Jersey: the so-called county lines. The “lines” have given Democratic and Republican officials the right for decades to group candidates for each office in a row on primary ballots, a preferential arrangement that has made it harder for outsiders to enter politics.
In March, federal Judge Zahid N. Quraishi ordered Democrats to redesign the ballot for the June primary election to combine all candidates running for each office into one group. A lawsuit to permanently ban the use of the “lines” is pending, but an appeals court has ruled in favor of ending the practice.
Left-leaning voters who support Kim see the judicial decision as an important step in breaking a decades-long corruption frenzy.
Jim Johnson, who ran against Murphy for governor in the 2017 Democratic primary, has been a long-time critic of the county line system and backroom dealings of local political organizations.
“Voters have been fed up with the state of New Jersey politics for some time now, and in large part they’re showing it by not showing up to the polls,” Johnson said.
“There’s a real demand for candidates with real ability and for independent candidates,” he added.
Next year’s election to replace Gov. Murphy, who is barred from reelection by term limits, will be the first opportunity to test the effectiveness of the new ballot design and is expected to be a truly competitive primary.
Norcross, who said a year ago he was stepping down from politics, will have much less influence over which Democratic candidate ultimately wins the nomination due to legal challenges and the likelihood that the county line ballot design will not be adopted for the first time in recent years.
There are many candidates, more expected, with four Democrats and three Republicans already campaigning.
Democratic congressional candidate Sue Altman argues the reforms could have a big impact: Years of lack of competitive primaries, she says, have allowed those in power to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
“Every single person in New Jersey is essentially paying a corruption tax,” she said.
Before Judge Quraishi ordered the ballot redesign in June, Platkin issued an opinion declaring the county line ballot design an unconstitutional practice that the Attorney General’s Office could not defend.
At the time, Murphy’s chances of winning the Senate primary hinged on running in the “districts” of the state’s most populous urban counties, and Platkin’s legal analysis of the indefensibility of the practice helped sour his relationship with the governor, one of his closest political allies who had once chosen Murphy for attorney general.
At a press conference this week announcing the charges against Norcross, Platkin offered a new vision for New Jersey politics.
“We often say in New Jersey that politics is a blood sport,” Platkin said as Norcross appeared at the news conference with his legal team and looked on from the front row.
“But there is nothing inherent in the culture of our state that demands we accept politics or a government that functions in this way,” he added.
