New Jersey Democratic Rep. Andy Kim announced Saturday that he’ll run next year against Sen. Bob Menendez in the wake of the senator’s indictment and refusal to step down.
“After calls to resign, Senator Menendez said ‘I am not going anywhere.’ As a result, I feel compelled to run against him. Not something I expected to do, but NJ deserves better. We cannot jeopardize the Senate or compromise our integrity,” Kim posted on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.
Kim has been representing New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes suburbs east of Trenton, since 2019. He won reelection last November by more than 10 percentage points.
This is Andy Kim. Earlier on this day, he had gone to the Capitol to do his job before a crowd of over 2,000 deranged people broke into the building, determined to do violence, and he took shelter with his co-workers. Once the situation was under control, Andy Kim returned to his duty: to certify New Jersey votes for Joe Biden.
The session ran late that night and Kim was exhausted when he was walking through the Rotunda to head home - but he was stopped by all the trash and debris the insurrectionists had left behind. He couldn’t leave it that way. He found some trash bags and spent a couple hours on his knees, cleaning up what had been left behind. When he finished, he quietly went home, and returned to work the next day.
These are the type of people we should have representing us.
You can tell he’s a progressive because he was actually interested in cleaning up a mess republicans made.
I’ll be honest, if it was me that day, I’d probably have been so fried after the long day and fearing for my life that I’d have gone home and let someone else do the cleaning. But no. He put his exhaustion aside and put some effort into cleaning things up. We need more people like Andy Kim in Congress.