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7 Months After Entering Hospice, Former President Jimmy Carter Celebrates 99th Birthday

Seven months after the Carter Center announced he was entering end of life hospice care, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn made a rare, surprise appearance during a peanut festival in their hometown of Plains, Georgia.

As they waved to bystanders while riding in an SUV that proceeded down the main street of Plains, it marked the beginning of a week celebrating Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday on Sunday – a milestone few thought the longest living U.S. President might reach.

“I think there is a misunderstanding about hospice that its only for people who are days away from death,” explains author Jonathan Alter. “That’s not what the hospice movements says.”

Alter, who wrote a biography about Jimmy Carter titled His Very Best, says the Carters are choosing to spend the end of their lives in much the same way as the rest of it. “Do as much as you can for as many as you can for as long as you can,” he says.

While retired from public life, Alter says announcing Carter’s transition to hospice, and revealing that Rosalynn Carter has dementia, provides the former president and first lady the opportunity to use their journey as another teachable moment for others.

“It was very intentional on their part to do some good for the world by sending a message that you don’t have to shrink from these end-of-life decisions, and there are other options for letting go,” he says.

While they have let go of the day-to-day operations of the global non-profit they founded in 1982, Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander says thousands of employees and volunteers around the world continue their work without interruption promoting peace and combating neglected tropical diseases.

“The last time we talked, he didn’t ask me about politics, he didn’t ask me about anything except guinea worm numbers,” Alexander told VOA during a recent Skype interview.

In a 2015 press conference announcing he was battling life threatening cancer, which he recovered from, Carter expressed his greatest wish: “I want the last guinea worm to die before I do,” he told the assembled crowd.

When the Carter Center took on guinea worm in the 1980s, there were 3.5 million cases in 21 countries. Alexander says the complete eradication of the neglected tropical disease is now closer than ever. “We’re down to six human cases in two countries,” she says.

Alexander told VOA she continues to have occasional phone conversations with President Carter.

“When I spoke to him last to wish him a happy birthday early, he said ‘I’m not quite sure how happy it is to be turning 99.’ His body is failing him. He doesn’t have the same physical abilities he used to have, but mentally, he remains pretty sharp, and I think that keeps him going,” Alexander said.

She notes that Carter is aware, and appreciative of the continued outpouring of support and admiration, most recently the stream of happy birthday wishes by video and photos the Carter Center is collecting for an interactive online mosaic.

“I think it might be the special sauce of what keeps him going right now. That and peanut butter ice cream,” she said.

It is a special dessert Alexander says the Carters enjoy together, sometimes surrounded by family, in the small community they have called home since the 1920s.

“They are exactly where they want to be – together … in their hometown of Plains, Georgia,” says Alexander. 
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Biden Signs Bill to Fund US Government, Avoid Shutdown

President Joe Biden has signed a bill to fund the U.S. government through mid-November and avoid a shutdown, less than an hour before money for federal agencies was set to run out.

Biden posted a picture of himself signing the bill on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, late Saturday night. In the message, he urged Congress to get to work immediately to pass funding bills for the full fiscal year.

The U.S. Senate, in a rare weekend meeting, approved a funding bill Saturday night, sending it to President Joe Biden for his signature and averting a widely dreaded shutdown of the federal government.

The bill, which passed the Senate 88-9 after winning approval in the House of Representatives, would fund the federal government through Nov. 17. The bill contains $16 billion in disaster aid sought by Biden but did not include money to help Ukraine in its war against Russia’s invasion.

After the vote, Biden released a statement saying the bill’s passage prevented “an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans.”

“We will have avoided a shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement after the vote. “Bipartisanship, which has been the trademark of the Senate, has prevailed. And the American people can breathe a sigh of relief.”

Had the bill not been approved by Congress and signed by the president by midnight Saturday, the federal government would have shut down.

More than 4 million U.S. military service personnel and government workers would not be paid, although essential services, such as air traffic control and official border entry points would still be staffed. Pensioners might not get their monthly government payments in time to pay bills and buy groceries, and national parks could be closed.

For days all of that seemed inevitable.

The abrupt turn of events began Saturday when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy changed tactics and put forward the funding bill that hard-line members of his Republican caucus opposed.

The House passed the bill, 335-91. More Democrats supported it than Republicans, even though it does not contain aid for Ukraine, a priority for Biden, Democrats and many Senate Republicans.

“Extreme MAGA Republicans have lost, the American people have won,” top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries told reporters ahead of the vote.

Republican Representative Lauren Boebert criticized the passage of the short-term stopgap bill.

“We should have forced the Senate to take up the four appropriations bills that the House has passed. That should have been our play,” she told CNN. “We should have forced them to come to the negotiating table, to come to conference, to hash out our differences.”

McCarthy is likely to face a motion from the right-wing members of his party to remove him as speaker.

“If somebody wants to remove me because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy said of the threat to oust him. “But I think this country is too important.”

Ukraine aid still likely

In his statement, Biden noted the lack of funding for Ukraine in the bill and said, “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted.”

Support for Ukraine remains strong in Congress and late Saturday night, a bipartisan group of Senate leadership members, led by Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, released a statement vowing to ensure the United States continues “to provide critical and sustained security and economic support for Ukraine.”

NBC News quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying Biden and the Defense Department have funds to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs “for a bit longer,” but it is “imperative” that Congress pass a Ukraine funding bill soon.

In the House, the lone Democrat to vote against the funding bill was Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois, the co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus. “Protecting Ukraine is in our national interest,” he said.

“This does look very chaotic, but this is not the first time it’s happened,” Todd Belt, director of the school of political management at The George Washington University, told VOA. “There is a price that has to be paid here. But that is the price of democracy. It does seem very messy sometimes. But eventually, usually you get some compromise.”

Such shutdowns have occurred four times in the last decade in the U.S., but often have lasted just a day or two until lawmakers reach a compromise to fully restart government operations. However, one shutdown that occurred during the administration of former President Donald Trump lasted 35 days, as he unsuccessfully sought funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
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California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Body Returns to San Francisco

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein returned Saturday to her hometown for the final time when a military jet carrying the late Democratic senator’s body landed at San Francisco International Airport.

The long-serving senator and political trailblazer died Thursday at her home in Washington, D.C., after a series of illnesses. At 90, she was the oldest member of Congress after first being elected to the Senate in 1992.

The arrival of her body was not open to the public. No details have been shared about services.

The former San Francisco mayor was a passionate advocate for priorities important to her state, including environmental protection, reproductive rights and gun control. But she also was known as a pragmatic, centrist lawmaker who reached out to Republicans and sought middle ground.

Her death was followed by a stream of tributes from around the nation, including from President Joe Biden, who served with Feinstein for years in the Senate and called her “a pioneering American” and a “cherished friend.”

California’s junior senator, Democrat Alex Padilla, called her “a towering figure — not just in modern California history, but in the history of our state and our nation.”

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters said Feinstein “spent her entire career breaking glass ceilings and opening doors into areas that had been perpetually dominated by men.”

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to soon appoint a replacement for the vacant Senate seat.
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US Supreme Court Will Take Up Abortion, Gun Cases in New Term

The Supreme Court is returning to a new term to take up some familiar topics — guns and abortion — while concerns about ethics swirl around the justices.

The year also will have a heavy focus on social media and how free speech protections apply online. A big unknown is whether the court will be asked to weigh in on any aspect of the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump and others or efforts in some states to keep the Republican off the 2024 presidential ballot because of his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Lower profile but vitally important, several cases in the term that begins Monday ask the justices to constrict the power of regulatory agencies.

“I can’t remember a term where the court was poised to say so much about the power of federal administrative agencies,” said Jeffrey Wall, who served as the deputy solicitor general in the Trump administration.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

One of those cases, to be argued Tuesday, threatens the ability of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to function. Unlike most agencies, the bureau is not dependent on annual appropriations from Congress, but instead gets its funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The idea when the agency was created following the recession in 2007-08 was to shield it from politics.

But the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down the funding mechanism. The ruling would cause “profound disruption by calling into question virtually every action the CFPB has taken” since its creation, the Biden administration said in a court filing.

Gun availability

The same federal appeals court also produced the ruling that struck down a federal law that aims to keep guns away from people facing domestic violence restraining orders from having firearms.

The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said its decision was compelled by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling expanding gun rights and directing judges to evaluate restrictions based on history and tradition. Judges also have invalidated other long-standing gun control laws.

The justices will hear the Texas case, in November, in what is their first chance to elaborate on the meaning of that decision in the earlier case, which has come to be known as Bruen.

Abortion

The abortion case likely to be heard by the justices also would be the court’s first word on the topic since it reversed Roe v. Wade’s right to abortion. The new case stems from a ruling, also by the 5th Circuit, to limit the availability of mifepristone, a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.

The administration already won an order from the high court blocking the appellate ruling while the case continues. The justices could decide later in the fall to take up the mifepristone case this term.

Ideological differences

The assortment of cases from the 5th Circuit could offer Chief Justice John Roberts more opportunities to forge alliances in major cases that cross ideological lines. In those cases, the conservative-dominated appeals court, which includes six Trump appointees, took aggressive legal positions, said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Georgetown law school’s Supreme Court Institute.

“The 5th Circuit is ready to adopt the politically most-conservative position on almost any issue, no matter how implausible or how much defiling of precedent it takes,” Gornstein said.

The three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have been together in the majority of some of the biggest cases in the past two years, including on guns, abortion and ending affirmative action in college admissions.

But in some important cases last term, the court split in unusual ways. In the most notable of those, Kavanaugh joined with Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices to rule that Alabama had not done enough to reflect the political power of Black voters in its congressional redistricting.

Roberts and Kavanaugh, this time joined by Barrett, also were in the majority with the liberal justices in a case that rejected a conservative legal effort to cut out state courts from oversight of elections for Congress and president.

Those outcomes have yet to do much to ameliorate the court’s image in the public’s mind. The most recent Gallup Poll, released last week, found Americans’ approval of and trust in the court hovering near record lows.

It is not clear whether those numbers would improve if the court were to adopt a code of conduct.

Questions about ethics

Several justices have publicly recognized the ethics issues, spurred by a series of stories questioning some of their practices. Many of those stories focused on Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to disclose travel and other financial ties with wealthy conservative donors, including Harlan Crow and the Koch brothers. But Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor also have been under scrutiny.

Behind the scenes, the justices are talking about an ethics code, and Kavanaugh has said he is hopeful the court would soon take “concrete steps.”

Justice Elena Kagan, who backs a high court code of ethics, said in an appearance at the University of Notre Dame that her colleagues are trying to work through their differences.

“There are, you know, totally good-faith disagreements or concerns, if you will. There are some things to be worked out. I hope we can get them worked out,” Kagan said. There’s no timetable for the court to act.

Democratic lawmakers and progressive critics of Alito and Thomas said those justices’ impartiality in some cases is in doubt because of financial ties, joint travel or friendships with people involved in the cases.

Alito has rejected calls to step aside from a tax case, and Thomas, who has been silent in the past about recusals, seems exceedingly unlikely to bow to his critics’ wishes now.
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On Brink of Government Shutdown, US Senate Tries to Approve Funding

The United States is on the brink of a federal government shutdown after hard-right Republicans in Congress rejected a longshot effort to keep offices open as they fight for steep spending cuts and strict border security measures that Democrats and the White House say are too extreme.

With no deal in place by midnight Saturday, federal workers will face furloughs, more than 2 million active-duty and reserve military troops will work without pay and programs and services that Americans rely on from coast to coast will begin to face shutdown disruptions.

The Senate will be in for a rare Saturday session to advance its own bipartisan package that is supported by Democrats and Republicans and would fund the government for the short-term, through November 17.

But even if the Senate can rush to wrap up its work this weekend to pass the bill, which also includes money for Ukraine aid and U.S. disaster assistance, it won’t prevent an almost certain shutdown amid the chaos in the House. On Friday, a massive hard-right revolt left Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest plan to collapse.

“Congress has only one option to avoid a shutdown — bipartisanship,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky echoed the sentiment, warning his own hard-right colleagues there is nothing to gain by shutting down the federal government.

“It heaps unnecessary hardships on the American people, as well as the brave men and women who keep us safe,” McConnell said.

The federal government is heading straight into a shutdown that poses grave uncertainty for federal workers in states all across America and the people who depend on them — from troops to border control agents to office workers, scientists and others.

Families that rely on Head Start for children, food benefits and countless other programs large and small are confronting potential interruptions or outright closures. At the airports, Transportation Security Administration officers and air traffic controllers are expected to work without pay, but travelers could face delays in updating their U.S. passports or other travel documents.

Congress has been unable to fund the federal agencies or pass a temporary bill in time to keep offices open for the start of the new budget year Sunday in large part because McCarthy, a Republican from California, has faced unsurmountable resistance from right-flank Republicans who are refusing to run government as usual.

McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of 21 hard-right holdouts opposed the package, despite steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.

The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The Democrats voted against it.

The House bill’s failure a day before Saturday’s deadline to fund the government leaves few options to prevent a shutdown.

“It’s not the end yet; I’ve got other ideas,” McCarthy told reporters.

Later Friday, after a heated closed-door meeting of House Republicans that pushed into the evening, McCarthy said he was considering options — among them, a two-week stopgap funding measure similar to the effort from hard-right senators that would be certain to exclude any help for Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Even though the House bill already cut routine Ukraine aid, an intensifying Republican resistance to the war effort means the Senate’s plan to attach $6 billion that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is seeking from the U.S. may have support from Democrats but not from most of McCarthy’s Republicans.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is working to stop that aid in the Senate package.

The White House has brushed aside McCarthy’s overtures to meet with President Joe Biden after the speaker walked away from the debt deal they brokered earlier this year that set budget levels.

Catering to his hard-right flank, McCarthy had returned to the spending limits the conservatives demanded back in January as part of the deal-making to help him become the House speaker.

The House package would not have cut the Defense, Veterans or Homeland Security departments but would have slashed almost all other agencies by up to 30% — steep hits to a vast array of programs, services and departments Americans routinely depend on.

It also added strict new border security provisions that would kickstart building a wall at the southern border with Mexico, among other measures. Additionally, the package would have set up a bipartisan debt commission to address the nation’s mounting debt load.

As soon as the floor debate began, McCarthy’s chief Republican critic, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, announced he would vote against the package, urging his colleagues to “not surrender.”

Gaetz said afterward that the speaker’s bill “went down in flames as I’ve told you all week it would.”

He and others rejecting the temporary measure want the House to keep pushing through the 12 individual spending bills needed to fund the government, typically a weekslong process, as they pursue their conservative priorities.

Republican leaders announced later Friday that the House would stay in session next week, rather than return home, to keep working on some of the 12 spending bills.

Some of the Republican holdouts, including Gaetz, are allies of former President Donald Trump, who is Biden’s chief rival in the 2024 race. Trump has been encouraging the Republicans to fight hard for their priorities and even to “shut it down.”

The hard right, led by Gaetz, has been threatening McCarthy’s ouster, with a looming vote to try to remove him from the speaker’s office unless he meets the conservative demands. Still, it’s unclear if any other Republican would have support from the House majority to lead the party.

Late Friday, Trump turned his ire to McConnell on social media, complaining the Republican leader and other GOP senators are “weak and ineffective” and making compromises with Democrats. He urged them, “Don’t do it!”
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7 Months Into Hospice Care, Jimmy Carter to Celebrate 99th Birthday

Former President Jimmy Carter is set to mark his 99th birthday on October 1 while in hospice care. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports on an outpouring of admiration and well wishes for the onetime peanut farmer and Georgia governor who promoted peace and fought tropical diseases after leaving the White House.
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Vowing to Defend Democracy, Biden Hits Hard at Trump

US President Joe Biden sharpened his attacks against Donald Trump on Thursday, delivering a forceful assertion that the former president and Republican front-runner represents an existential threat to the country’s democratic values and institutions. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Vowing to Defend Democracy, Biden Hits Hard at Trump

U.S. President Joe Biden sharpened his attacks against Donald Trump on Thursday, delivering his most forceful assertion to date that the former president and Republican front-runner represents an existential threat to the country’s democratic values and institutions.

In a speech in the western state of Arizona, Biden charged that Trump holds the “dangerous notion” that he has unchecked power and is above the law.

“Trump says the Constitution gave him, quote, the right to do whatever he wants as president, end of quote. I’ve never heard a president say that even in jest,” Biden said. “Not guided by the Constitution or by common service and decency toward our fellow Americans, but by vengeance and vindictiveness.”

Trump in 2019 said he has such rights under Article II of the Constitution, which describes the powers of the president. In March, he told supporters, “I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

“There’s something dangerous happening in America right now,” Biden declared in Arizona, adding that American democracy is “still at risk.”

The speech is his fourth in a series of presidential addresses that lays out what he sees as the dangers of election denialism and political violence that have loomed over the country since thousands of Trump supporters attacked Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to overturn Biden’s electoral victory.

“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy — the MAGA movement,” the president said, referring to his predecessor’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” He warned that their “extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy.”

“They’re not hiding their attacks,” Biden said. “They’re openly promoting them, attacking the free press as the enemy of the people. Attacking the rule of law as an impediment. Fomenting voter suppression and election subversion.”

Biden has until now avoiding painting mainstream Republicans with the same brush as Trump’s most ardent supporters, whom he describes as MAGA Republicans. But this time Biden suggested that they are complicit.

“Although I don’t believe even a majority of Republicans think that, the silence is deafening,” he said, pointing to Republican reaction to Trump’s recent suggestion that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs who will soon step down from his post should be executed for allegedly betraying the former president.

Biden’s speech came the same day that House Republicans held their first hearing in a Biden impeachment inquiry, over allegations of corruption in relation to his son Hunter’s business dealings. The Republicans detailed foreign payments to members of the Biden family but did not provide evidence that the president had benefited from the funds.

The White House denies any wrongdoing and dismisses the investigation as politically motivated.

Harshest rhetoric

While Biden has long branded the MAGA movement as an existential threat to democracy, Thursday’s speech contained some of his harshest rhetoric against Trump, who is facing four criminal indictments with a total of 91 charges ranging from falsifying business records to seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in all charges.

For months, Biden had remained mostly silent about his predecessor, likely to avoid giving credence to Trump’s assertions that the charges against him are evidence that Biden is weaponizing the justice system against a political opponent. The White House denies the allegation.

Biden did not mention any of Trump’s legal troubles in his speech, a sound strategy according to some observers.

“There’s plenty about Trump’s behavior in office and statements of what he will do if he wins in 2024 that Biden can point toward without having to say, ‘Oh, and by the way, he’s facing jail time,'” said William Howell, a professor in American politics at the University of Chicago.

Warnings of a threat to democracy posed by Trump’s MAGA movement could resonate in Arizona, a former Republican stronghold that in recent years turned into a swing state and has seen its share of efforts by Trump supporters to discredit 2020 election results.

The White House selected the state as the speech venue precisely for those reasons, as well as to honor the late Arizona Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee who died in 2018, whom Biden referred to as a “brother.”

Biden announced federal funding to construct the McCain Library at Arizona State University, using the American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package passed in 2021.

Speaking before Biden, former Ambassador Cindy McCain said Biden and her late husband maintained decades of friendship despite deep political differences.

Biden contrasted McCain’s legacy and the late senator’s principle to “put partisanship aside and put country first,” to those espousing political violence.

“Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence,” he said. “Regardless of party, such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America.”

Do Americans care?

As Biden gears up to fight for a second term, his campaign strategists believe that defending democratic institutions and values remains a resonant theme for voters — a reason that the video announcing the president’s reelection run opened with footage of the Jan. 6 attack.

However, polls show the economy is the issue that weighs most on voters’ mind. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, 49% of Americans say inflation or price increases are the most important issues facing the country; 9% cite unemployment, and 10% cite economic inequality.

Various polls show Biden’s public approval rating stagnating below 50% since August 2021, largely due to concerns over his handling of the economy.

Attacks on American democracy may not be the No. 1 concern among voters, Chicago University’s Howell told VOA, but it’s not trivial, either, so it’s no surprise that Biden is homing in on the issue.

“If you think about democracy as a kind of a catchall category, not just for concerns about rising authoritarianism but also just the ability for our country to govern itself, concerns about rising polarization, whether or not we’re going to have another government shutdown — these kinds of things … will resonate with some voters,” Howell said.

As Biden spoke, his White House blasted out messages counting down the hours until Oct. 1, the day of a potential partial government shutdown should Congress fail to approve funding for federal agencies. The administration blames the impasse on “extreme House Republicans’ chaos and inability to govern.”

Republican front-runner

Despite his legal woes, Trump remains the dominant force in his party. A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll shows the former president is supported by 47% of Republican primary voters, a group that amounts to roughly a third of the American electorate.

Trump’s position with Republican primary voters has only strengthened over the year as various indictments have rolled out, said Chris Jackson, a senior vice president at Ipsos.

“That’s happening at the same time that his position with the general public is not necessarily strengthening the same way,” Jackson told VOA.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Biden and Trump are tied in a hypothetical November 2024 election, with both receiving 39% of the vote and one in five voters undecided.
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US Senator Menendez Pleads Not Guilty to Corruption Charges

U.S. Senator Bob Menendez pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges of taking bribes from three New Jersey businessman, as calls for his resignation from his fellow Democrats escalated.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last week accused Menendez, 69, and his wife of accepting gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for the senator using his influence to aid Egypt’s government and interfere with law enforcement investigations of the businessmen.

Menendez entered the plea at a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in Manhattan.

His wife, Nadine Menendez, 56, and businessmen Jose Uribe, 56, and Fred Daibes, 66, also pleaded not guilty. A third businessman, Wael Hana, 40, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.

Menendez, one of two senators representing New Jersey, stepped down from his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as required under his party’s rules. But on Monday he said he would stay in the Senate and fight the charges.

More than half of all U.S. Democratic senators — including Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey — have called on Menendez, a powerful voice on foreign policy who has at times bucked his own party, to resign since the charges were unveiled on Friday.

Democrats narrowly control the Senate with 51 seats, including three independents who normally vote with them, to the Republicans’ 49. Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who would appoint a temporary replacement should Menendez step aside, has also called for him to resign.

The indictment contained images of gold bars and cash that investigators seized from Menendez’s home. Prosecutors say Hana arranged meetings between the senator and Egyptian officials — who pressed him to sign off on military aid — and in return put his wife on the payroll of a company he controlled.

The probe marks the third time Menendez has been under investigation by federal prosecutors. He has never been convicted.
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