Not a ‘caretaker’: Meet Bob Menendez’s extremely temporary replacement

“It’s on purpose,” Helmy explained. “I don’t want people to come in and say, ‘Oh, you’ve made this home.'”

This space was once occupied by former Sen. Bob Menendez, the man who represented New Jersey for more than 18 years before a lurid corruption scandal brought his tenure to an ignominious end last month. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Helmy, his former chief of staff, to replace Menendez after his bribery trial led to a conviction and he resigned. Helmy took office two weeks ago and will serve only until the results of the state’s US Senate election are certified in late November, at which point he’ll step down. He has no intention of running for office in the future.

“I don’t see this as a caretaker or a placeholder. I’m a senator,” Helmy told me. “Whether you’re here for a day, or three months, four months, or 40 years, you’re a United States Senator.” Still, the 44-year-old is set to have a strikingly brief tenure, even as he makes history as the first Coptic American ever to serve in the Senate. During his maiden speech last Thursday, he noted that he may ultimately tie with a long-dead senator who served in the 1800s to become the 10th shortest-serving senator in American history. “I will forever be rooting for the good health and good fortune of those who follow so that I can make at least one top-10 list at some point in my life,” Helmy joked.

His dozen-or-so weeks in office also overlap with the final stretch of a tumultuous presidential campaign, and he has just one more week of session ahead of him before the election. Unlike the other 12 senators who’ve taken office during Joe Biden’s presidency, Helmy was sworn in by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate President Pro Tempore, instead of Kamala Harris — the Vice President was in Pennsylvania that day, preparing for the debate. His most important function, arguably, is to serve as a party-line vote to advance and confirm Biden’s nominees.

He’s acutely aware of all of this, even as he works to accomplish as much as one possibly could under the circumstances. “I see myself as sort of continuing my prior roles as a staffer,” Helmy told me. “A simple part, but a really important part of me being here, is just being present and allowing the leadership to move on our priorities.”

But he’s also investing much of his energy into youth mental health, an issue to which he devoted roughly half of his maiden speech.

“It’s not only sort of the accessibility to care that I want to focus on, but what are the underlying issues, and what are we doing to help get at those sources,” Helmy told me. “Because both are problems.”

A member of the ‘Society of the Interims’

This is the second time in a little more than a decade that New Jersey has had an interim senator. When former Sen. Frank Lautenberg — another former boss of Helmy — died in 2013, then-Gov. Chris Christie appointed the state’s Republican attorney general, Jeff Chiesa, to serve for five months until Sen. Cory Booker was elected.

But interim senators are a relative rarity in American politics. Since the turn of the century, there have only been six who’ve served for less than six months. Those who find themselves in such a position describe it, invariably, as an “honor,” and the relationships that interim senators develop with their more entrenched colleagues can often outlast their tenures.

“The benefit of being appointed and not having to run for the office is that you don’t have to campaign against anyone, so you arrive without having made political enemies,” said former Democratic Sen. Mo Cowan, who served as Massachusetts’ junior senator for five months in 2013 after John Kerry was confirmed as Secretary of State. When Helmy’s appointment was announced, Cowan — now an executive at a healthcare company — jokingly offered him a “membership card” for the “Society of the Interims.”

“There’s only 100 people that get the chance to vote on these issues,” Chiesa told me. “He’s one of them now, and when you’re there in that position, it’s a pretty overwhelming responsibility.”

Though his time in the Senate will be fleeting, Helmy’s no stranger to politics. He served for four years as Murphy’s chief of staff, and before that, as a top staffer for Booker, his boss-turned-colleague. (Helmy and Booker aren’t the only Senate duo like this — Sen. Michael Bennet was once chief of staff for fellow Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper, when he was the mayor of Denver.) Murphy also appointed Helmy last year to be a commissioner for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a position he technically still holds and will return to after he resigns.

Helmy’s political experience has enabled him to get a running start as the upper chamber’s most junior member. As of publication, he’s already introduced three bills and co-sponsored a half-dozen others.

And he doesn’t mind if none of those bills make it into law on his watch. “If every member of the House or Senate said, ‘What’s only going to get done within the guaranteed window you get?’ you’d get nothing,” Helmy said. “So I appreciate that much of what I will do is introduce, co-sponsor, and speak on issues that hopefully outlive me.”

‘You’ll always be remembered by your last act’

No state has had a more tumultuous year than New Jersey, and Helmy’s ephemeral presence in the Senate is, in some ways, the final twist. Menendez’s sudden political collapse gave way to a bitter if short-lived primary campaign between Rep. Andy Kim and First Lady Tammy Murphy, a fight that put a national spotlight on how machine politics still play an outsize role in the Garden State.

Murphy ultimately dropped out in March, and Kim handily won the primary two months later. But when the governor had the choice to appoint someone to Menendez’s soon-to-be-vacant seat, he opted against giving his party’s nominee a leg-up by placing him in the seat. “There’s a tradition in New Jersey where, when this happens, you don’t put your finger on the scale,” Gov. Murphy told Semafor last month.

Helmy’s known Kim for years, and he’s rooting for the congressman’s victory over GOP candidate Curtis Bashaw. But he’s also a Murphy loyalist who’s ready to defend the machine, along with the so-called “party bosses” that still wield significant influence in state politics. The first lady had been counting on that party infrastructure to win her the nomination. “What those folks do every day is party-build,” Helmy said of party officials. “We want to be a party that allows as many people to elevate their voices and seek office. We also want to be the party that wins every November.”

Perhaps the most consequential impact of the Kim-Murphy primary was the downfall of the state’s “county line” — a ballot design that allowed county-level party organizations to exert significant influence over the outcome of primaries — as the result of a lawsuit brought by Kim and other candidates. Under that system, candidates who were not endorsed by county party organizations or local party bosses could find themselves listed far off to the side on the ballot, making voters less likely to select them.

While Helmy acknowledged that there’s “probably a better way” to indicate which candidate the party supports than that, he stuck up for the notion that ballots should show which candidates have the local parties’ backing. “The county parties still need to have preferred candidates,” he said, warning that without such a system, “you run the risk of having money overinfluence against party support.”

Sitting in Menendez’s former office, Helmy also lamented the way the long-serving New Jersey senator’s career came to an end. “Bob’s office was the office you always competed with,” Helmy noted, referencing his own time with Booker and former Sen. Frank Lautenberg. “It made us all better. And I think his legacy in the communities that know the work that he and his team did, you’re not going to lose that overnight.”

“I’m really sad about what he has been convicted of doing because there’s just no way that’s not going to be a part of the legacy,” he added. “You’ll always be remembered by your last act.”