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New Jersey: Thirteenth District Rep. Robert Menendez (D) Last Updated May 18, 2003
The Statue of Liberty, standing in New York Harbor since 1886, has been the great symbol of America welcoming immigrants to its shores. Actually, the statue is on the New Jersey side of the harbor, and so (as the Supreme Court ruled in 1998) is most of Ellis Island, where they were processed. The towns sitting on the granite and gneiss ridge of Hudson County, overlooking the harbor, have in particular been immigrant territory. When immigration was shut off in 1924, many children and grandchildren of the Irish and Italian immigrants stayed in Hudson County, living in the same neighborhoods, working on the same docks or factories and voting the dictates of the same political machine. Hudson County was the setting of one of America's classic political machines, undisciplined by any metropolitan elite. From 1917-49, the boss of Hudson County was Frank (''I am the law'') Hague; his machine chose governors and U.S. Senators, prosecutors and judges, and had influence in the White House of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hague collected high taxes from industries clustered here--who then passed them on to consumers everywhere--and in return gave them an orderly city, free of most crime and vice, and a work force insulated against racketeers and militant unions. Hague's successor, John V. Kenny, was boss from 1949-71--continuous power for 54 years. But Hudson County began changing again, in ways little noticed by either the local machine or Manhattan sophisticates. New immigrants were coming in--refugees from Castro's Cuba, other Latinos and Asians after the 1965 immigration act. Union City became predominantly Cuban, Jersey City neighborhoods became heavily Latino. Upscale young singles looking for lower rents moved into Hoboken's five-story Victorian apartments that sparkle with light off the Hudson, and were a quick commute through the PATH tubes to Wall Street or Greenwich Village. Starting in the 1980s, huge new condominium and office developments went up in Jersey City--Port Liberte, Newport, Liberty Place, Port Imperial South, a 45-story Goldman Sachs tower, back-office buildings for Chase Bank, Merrill Lynch, Paine Webber, U.S. Trust. In Hoboken, shopping and apartment complexes are going up on waterfront sites where Maxwell House Coffee and Lipton Tea had great factories (and where the movie classic, On the Waterfront, was filmed on location). Aiding this private sector growth was reform of the public sector, notably by Jersey City's Republican former mayor, Bret Schundler, a former Wall Streeter elected in 1992 after the incumbent went to jail, who was elected to full terms in 1993 and 1997; he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2001. Meanwhile, new immigrants continue to arrive. Union City is less Cuban today, as middle class Cubans move to Bergen County suburbs, and more Colombian, Ecuadoran, Peruvian and Dominican. Old rail lines long embedded in pavement are being dug up and used for the new Hudson-Bergen light rail lines, and new ferry terminals are being built on the Hudson. Hudson County, which seemed to be dying a generation ago, is now thriving with new life. The 13th Congressional District includes most of Hudson County plus most of the immigrant entry ports along the water, from West New York and Weehawken, where Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804, south past Jersey City and Bayonne (where you can still find bocce courts), past the Port of New York and New Jersey to the waterfront areas of Elizabeth, Linden, Carteret (with its Sikh community), Woodbridge and Perth Amboy. It also includes the Ironbound district of Newark, with Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants, crowded stores and $300,000 houses, Harrison and part of industrial Kearny. The district's population is 48% Hispanic; black neighborhoods in Jersey City were put into the majority-black, neighboring 10th District. The 13th is heavily Democratic. The congressman from the 13th District is Robert Menendez, a Democrat first elected in 1992. He is of Cuban descent and grew up in Union City, America's most densely populated city (in 2000 it had 60,000 people in 1.3 square miles), and got into politics early. He was elected to the school board in 1974, at 20. He worked for Union City Mayor William Musto in the 1970s, but quit and testified against Musto in a corruption trial, and ran against him and lost in 1982. Menendez was elected mayor in 1986, to the Assembly in 1987 and Senate in 1991, serving both as mayor and legislator (a common practice in New Jersey) until his 1992 election to Congress. He was the first New Jersey Latino in the legislature and Congress. When new district lines were created and incumbent Frank Guarini retired, Menendez won the 1992 primary 68%-32% and the general election 64%-31%. In the House, Menendez serves on the International Relations Committee where he became ranking minority member on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee in 2001. He has been a strong supporter of anti-Castro legislation--the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. He criticized the Clinton administration for not enforcing Helms-Burton and taking steps to relax the trade embargo. When Elian Gonzalez was collected by federal agents, he said grimly, "I think that the use of armed agents with automatic weapons, in the pre-dawn hours on the morning of the holiest weekend of the year, is, in my mind, something we would see in Fidel Castro's Cuba, not in the democracy of the United States." But his concerns are not limited to Cuba. He supported the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the proposal to allow Central American and Haitian refugees long in this country to remain. In May 2001 he got the committee to support for continuing negotiations "with the objective of completing the rules and guidelines for the Kyoto protocol." He spoke out in support of Israel's military actions in May 2002 even though he said his district "has far more Arabs than Jews." Noting the increasing importance of the financial services industry in Hudson County, he broke with many Democrats to support the bankruptcy bill and financial services deregulation; one Blue Dog Democrat called him "the pro-business member of the leadership." He has pressed for more set-asides for minority contractors and Senate confirmation of Hispanic judges--though he opposed Bush nominee Miguel Estrada. On local issues, he got $12 million for a ferry terminal near the Port Imperial South projects, whose owner is a key financial backer. "If he ends up, along with everybody else, being a beneficiary of what I'm advocating, what can I say?" He has continued to press for more ferries--whose value was shown when people fled Lower Manhattan across the Hudson on September 11. Menendez has shown fine political skills. He aggressively supported Loretta Sanchez against the election challenge brought by Robert Dornan, whom she ousted in November 1996. In November 1998, his party colleagues elected him vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus. When Senator Frank Lautenberg announced his retirement in February 1999, Menendez was widely expected to run for the Senate. But support was not forthcoming from New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli, the DSCC Chairman, who wanted a deep-pockets candidate and found him in Jon Corzine, whom Menendez endorsed in November 1999. In July 2000, after Torricelli said he would run for governor, Menendez choreographed an endorsement by many Hudson County Democrats of Jim McGreevey, which helped persuade Torricelli to withdraw ignominiously from the race. He is a major player in Hudson County and state politics. He helped to defeat mayors of Union City and Hoboken and install friendly replacements. McGreevey, whom he helped in July 2000, made him statewide coordinator of his 2001 campaign. Menendez claims that McGreevey's share of the Hispanic vote rose from 48% in 1997 to 72% in 2001. One reason Menendez decided not to run for the Senate in 2000 is that Minority Leader Dick Gephardt urged him to stay in the House, arguing that as a leader of a Democratic majority he could be more important than a junior senator. Democratic caucus chairmen and vice-chairmen are limited to two two-year terms, so Menendez in 2001 began running for caucus chairman. He raised more than $1 million for House Democrats in the 2000 cycle and $3 million in the 2002 cycle and traveled around the country campaigning. His Hispanic background was an asset, and not just within the 20-member Hispanic Caucus. "There are 50 to 60 members who are not Hispanic but have significant Hispanic communities in their districts," he points out. "The Census was a real eye-opener. I have members asking me to travel with them to places I never thought I'd be invited." He issues a Latino Leadership Link every week in English and Spanish. Menendez announced his candidacy in October 2001, just after the Caucus picked Nancy Pelosi over Steny Hoyer to replace David Bonior as minority whip. Also running was Rosa DeLauro, who had been Assistant to Minority Leader Richard Gephardt. Leadership elections are decided by secret ballot, and are sometimes bitter; the total number of commitments announced by candidates usually exceeds the number of members of the caucus. Occasionally sour notes are sounded in public. In February 2002 Menendez charged that DeLauro backers were saying, wrongly, that he did not support abortion rights; he argued that the caucus, having chosen Pelosi for the number one post, would be better off with an Hispanic than another woman in the number two post. In an unusual turn, Pelosi openly endorsed DeLauro and Hoyer openly endorsed Menendez. Then, on September 30, came another opportunity to run for the Senate: Bob Torricelli dropped out of the race and McGreevey and other Democratic leaders sought another candidate. Menendez, with more than $2 million in his campaign treasury, probably could have had the nomination for the asking. He pondered the situation for a day, and then decided not to run; he said he was too committed to getting a Democratic majority in the House and becoming caucus chairman. On November 5 he failed to achieve the first goal and on November 14, the day of the caucus election, he very nearly failed to achieve the second. The day before the caucus meeting, the 21 Blue Dogs met and pledged to vote as a bloc for their favorite candidate, which by a 16-5 vote was Menendez; it's not clear that all of them did. Menendez walked into the caucus with a list of 107 members who had agreed to openly support him. He won 104-103. Two members were absent. The decisive vote was cast by Mike Feeley of Colorado, who was in a still undecided race that he ended up losing by 121 votes. In similar circumstances, Democrats had let a member in an undecided race vote in 1996, and both sides agreed to follow the precedent. Menendez has been reelected to the House easily, and spent almost all the $2 million plus he raised in the 2002 cycle helping other Democrats. In December 2002, he was asked about his future prospects. "Being speaker's a possibility. I also don't discount the possibility of running for the Senate. You know, 49 is young. By the barometer of Strom Thurmond, there's still half a century to go."
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